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Adventures in Indigence 

and 
Other Essays 



ADVENTURES IN 
INDIGENCE 

AND 

OTHER ESSAYS 



BY 
LAURA SPENCER PORTOR 




The Atlantic Monthly Press 
Boston 



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Copyright, 1918, by 
The Atlantic Monthly Press, Inc. 

All Rights Reserved 



DEC 2- '^'M 

©GLA508690 



CONTENTS 

Adventures in Indigence 

I. Musgrove I 

II. The Harp and the Violin .... 1 3 

III. Major Lobley 25 

IV. Mamie Faffelfinger 38 

V. The Lure of the "Chiffoneer" ... 55 

VI. Margaret 68 

VII. Margharetta 87 

VIII. The Powers of the Poor . . . . lOI 

IX. Horatio II4 

Guests 

I. Relations of the Spirit 1 29 

II. Kith and Kin 155 

The Disappointments and Vicissitudes 

OF Mice 183 

Birthdays and Other Egotisms . . 215 



PREFACE 

It is doubtful whether the present volume 
should be looked on as a collection of essays, 
or might not more aptly be called a book of 
personal experience. The true essayist offers 
you fewer doubts and peradventures. He 
comes with clear philosophies, to which he 
means to convert you. He is well armed for 
controversy. He will cite you Scripture, the 
Decalogue, and the statutes. You will find 
it difficult to pick a flaw in his argument. 
Never hope to prove him wrong! He leaves no 
man reasonable choice but to agree with him. 
He is a sworn advocate. His essay is his brief. 
If he be a man of force, his cause is won before 
the jurymen take their places. Be sure he will 
prove his point before any just judge. The 
case, it seems when you come to think upon it 
later, might almost have gone by default, so 
little is there any argument left you. 

The papers in the present volume are not so 
forethought, nor are they designed to be so 
convincing. There is more memory than doc- 
trine in them ; more experience than authority, 



Preface 

theology, or faith. In them will be found Httle 
that is taught by the schools, upheld by the 
courts, or propounded by the Fathers. Per- 
haps they contain not so much what I believe, 
as what, because of persistent personal obser- 
vation and testing and proving, of my own, I 
have been at last unable to disbelieve. These 
papers, in short, deal with none of the usual 
and traditional theories of life, but rather with 
life as I have intimately found it and lived it. 
It is one thing to uphold loyally an ancient 
faith which has from the beginning been 
taught one, or to which one has, on the re- 
spected authority of others, been converted; 
it is a wholly other thing to uphold sincerely, 
and for what it may be worth, a belief which 
one has but evolved and tested and proven for 
one's self. God forbid it should be upheld ar- 
rogantly ! For, as the first method is calculated 
to produce devout believers, zealous to convert 
those whose beliefs differ from their own, so 
does the other tend, rather, to make devout 
observers; and as the passionate believer is to 
the last unable to understand how others could 
believe differently than he does; the devout 
observer is eager to mark where and how the 



Preface 

observations of others differ from his own, or, 
it may be, happily coincide with them. He has 
a persistent desire to know whether, given the 
same experience and facts, others will approve 
of his findings. 

It is for this reason, no doubt, that I find 
myself wondering whether the reader of this 
volume has discovered, as I have, — all tradi- 
tion, teaching, theory, and articles of faith 
to the contrary, — indisputable evidence of 
the mysterious and imponderable powers of 
the poor. Has Life the Educator revealed 
herself to another in such a fashion as to me? 
Have you who read — you also — a secret 
belief in certain unmistakable superiorities 
hidden away in the unwritten records and the 
unadministered laws of lesser creatures than 
ourselves? Have you, like myself, lost birth- 
days irretrievably, and found in their place 
that larger nativity writ in a more universal 
horoscope? 

Though these papers do not claim to be 
more than personal records of experience and 
adventure and consequent belief, yet there 
may be those who will decry the persistent 
personality, who will condemn the seeming 
ix 



Preface 

egotism. To these there is recommended — 
perhaps a little wistfully — the paper, toward 
the last, which attempts to deal with this 
rather widespread failing. 

L. S. P. 



ADVENTURES IN INDIGENCE 



MUSGROVE 

Both Stevenson and Lamb, writing of 
"Beggars," fall into what I take to be a grave 
misapprehension. They both write a defense, 
and constitute themselves advocates. Lamb 
brilliantly solicits our pity for these "pension- 
ers on our bounty"; Stevenson, though he 
characteristically makes himself comrade and 
brother of his client, and presents the "hum- 
buggery" of the accused as a legitimate art, 
nevertheless thinks himself but too evidently 
of a higher order, and the better gentleman of 
the two. Here, and it would seem in spite of 
himself, are patronage and condescension. 

I own that such an attitude shocks me and 
makes me apprehensive. Were I superstitious, 
of a certain creed, I should cross myself to 
ward ofif calamity; or were I a Greek of the 
ancient times, I should certainly pour a pro- 
pitiatory libation to Hermes, god of wayfarers, 
thieves, vagabonds, mendicants, and the like. 



Adventures in Indigence 

"Poor wretches," indeed! "Pensioners," 
they! "Ragamuffins! humbugs!" They, with 
their occult powers! They, mind you, needing 
our advocacy ! I could indeed bear a different 
testimony. 

I think I began first to know the power of the 
poor, and to fall under their sway, when I was 
certainly not more than six years old. It must 
have been about then that I was learning to 
sew. This seems to have been a profession to 
which I was so temperamentally disinclined 
that my mother, to sweeten the task, was wont 
during the performance of it to read to me. 
While I sat on a hassock at her feet scooping 
an unwilling perpendicular needle in and out 
of difficult hems, my mother would read from 
one of many little chap-books and children's 
tracts, which were kept commonly in a flat 
wicker darning-basket in her wardrobe; little 
paper books held over from her own and her 
mother's childhood. They were illustrated 
with quaint woodcuts, and the covers of them 
were colored. I was allowed to choose which 
one was to be read. 

One day — "because the time was ripe," 
I suppose — I selected a little petunia-colored 



Musgrove 

one, outwardly very pleasing to my fancy. It 
contained the story and the pictures of a mis- 
erable beggar and a haughty and unfeeling 
little girl. He was in rags, and reclined, from 
feebleness I fancy, on the pavement; she walk- 
ed proudly in a full-skirted dress, strapped 
slippers, and pantalets. She wore a dipping 
leghorn with streamers. Just over this she car- 
ried a most proud parasol; just under it a nose 
aristocratically, it may even be said unduly, 
high in the air. 

I think I need not dwell on the tale, save to 
say that it was one of the genus known as 
" moral." There was only one ending possible 
to the story: the triumph of humility, the 
downfall of pride and prosperity; swift and 
awful retribution falling upon her of the leg- 
horn and pantalets. I believe they allowed 
her in the last picture a pallet of straw, a rag- 
ged petticoat, bare feet, clasped hands, and a 
prayerful reconciliation with her Maker. The 
story was rendered distinctly poignant for me 
by the fact that I possessed a parasol of pink 
"pinked silk," which was held on Sundays 
and certain other occasions proudly — it also 
— over a leghorn with streamers which dipped 
3 



Adventures in Indigence 

back and front exactly as did the little girl's 
in the story. But never, never, — once I had 
made the acquaintance of that story, — was 
my nose carried haughtily under it, when by 
chance I sighted one of that race so numerous 
and so ancient, so well known and so little 
known to us all. From that day I began to 
know the power of the poor. 

I can remember delectable candies that I 
did not buy, delicious soft cocoanut sticks that 
I never tasted, joys that I relinquished, hopes 
that I deferred, for the questionable but tyr- 
annous comfort of a penny in an alien tin cup, 
and the inevitable "God bless you, little lady ! " 
which, remembering her of the leghorn and 
pantalets, I knew to be of necessity more de- 
sirable than the delights I forewent. 

There was an old blind man there in my 
home town, whom I remember very keenly. 
He used to go up and down, he and his dog, 
in front of the only caravansary the place 
boasted, — the Hotel Latonia, — tap-tap, tap- 
tapping. He had the peculiar stiff, hesitating 
walk of the bhnd, the strange expectant upward 
tilt of the face. He wore across his shoulder 
a strap on which was fastened a little tin cup. 
4 



Musgrove 

I used to see the drummers and leisurely 
men of a certain order, their chairs tilted back 
against the hotel wall, their heels in the chair- 
rungs, their hats on the back of their heads, 
their thumbs in their arm-holes, their cigars 
tilted indifferently to heaven, and they even 
cracking their jokes and slapping their knees 
and roaring with laughter, or perhaps yawn- 
ing, perfectly unaware of the blind man, it 
seemed, while he passed by slowly, tap-tap, 
tap-tapping. 

But it was never thus with me. His cane 
tapped, not only on the pavement, but directly 
on my heart. You could have heard it, had 
you put your ear there. It may have seemed 
that his eyes were turned to the sky. That 
was but a kind of physical delusion. I knew 
better. In some occult way they were search- 
ing me out and finding me. I can give you no 
idea of the command of the thing. Perhaps I 
have no need to. Your own childhood — it is 
not improbable — may have been under a sim- 
ilar dominion. 

If I thought to experiment and withhold my 
penny, I might escape the blind man for a 
while: I might elude him, for instance, while 

5 



Adventures in Indigence 

the other members of the family and the 
guests in that old home of my childhood were 
gay and talkative at the supper-table ; or after- 
ward, when laughter and song drowned the 
lesser sounds; or while I stood safe in the 
loved shelter of my father's arm, listening to 
conversations I enjoyed, even though I could 
not understand them; or while, in the more in- 
timate evenings, he took his flute from its case, 
screwed its wonderful parts together, and, his 
fingers rising and falling with magic and pre- 
cision on the joined wood and ivory, played 
"Mary of Argyll" until I too heard the mavis 
singing. But later, later, when I lay alone in 
my bed in the nursery in the moonlight, or, if 
it were winter, in the waning firelight and the 
creeping shadows, then, then there came up the 
stairs and through the rooms the sound of the 
blind man's cane, tap-tap, tap-tapping. He 
had come for his penny. And the next time I 
saw him, with a chastened spirit and a sense of 
escape I gave him two. 

But my own childish subserviency to the 

poor did not give me so great a sense of their 

power as my mother's relation to them. She, it 

seems, was perpetually at their service. Let 

6 



Musgrove 

them but raise a hand indicating their need 
ever so slightly, and she moved in quick obedi- 
ence, although it seemed she too must some- 
times have wearied of such service. Guests 
were many and frequent in that old home, as 
I have elsewhere told; but these came either 
by announcement or by invitation; the poor, 
on the contrary, came unasked, unannounced, 
and exactly when they chose, as by royal pre- 
rogative. Indeed, many a time I have seen my 
mother excuse herself to a guest, to wait sym- 
pathetically upon a man or a woman with a 
basket, — it might be the queen of the gypsies, 
with vivid, memorable face; or the Wandering 
Jew in the very flesh ; or it might be Kathleen 
ni Houlihan herself, all Erin looking out, haunt- 
ing you, from her tragic old eyes, — offering 
soap or laces at exorbitant prices, or other less 
useful wares, tendered for sale and excuse at 
the kitchen door. 

There was one whom I especially remember 
— Musgrove. He was a fine marquis of a man, 
was Musgrove, as slender as a fiddle and with 
as neat a waist. He used to come to the front 
door and sit by the old hall clock, waiting my 
mother's pleasure. He had a wife and seven or 
7 



Adventures in Indigence 

nine children, and a marvelous multiplicity of 
woes. There was a generosity and spacious- 
ness about the calamities of Musgrove — 
something mythopoeic, promethean. Trage- 
dies befell him with consistent abundance. 
Four or five of the seven or nine had broken 
their arms, almost put out their eyes, or had 
just escaped by a hair's breadth from perma- 
nent blanket-mortgage disability when the 
floor of the cottage they lived in fell through ; 
or they had been all but carried off wholesale by 
measles. Once all nine, as I remember it, were 
poisoned en gros by Sunday-school-picnic ice- 
cream, which left the children of others un- 
touched. Only myths were comparable. Niobe 
alone, and she not altogether successfully, 
could have matched calamities with him. 

By and by Time itself, I think, wearied of 
Musgrove. I think my mother, sympathetic 
as she was, must have come to think the ar- 
rows of outrageous fortune were falling far too 
thick for likelihood, even on so shining a mark 
as Musgrove. She came from interviews with 
him with a kind of gentle weariness. But Mus- 
grove, I am very sure, had an eye for the 
drama. He knew his exits and his entrances, 
8 



Musgrove 

and I have reason to believe no shade of feeling 
in my mother's face was lost upon him. 

He came one day to say good-bye, his shab- 
biness heightened, but brightened also, by a 
red cravat. It was safe now, no doubt, to al- 
low himself this gayety. He knew that my 
mother would be glad to hear that, through the 
kindness of someone nearly as kind as herself, 
he had been able to obtain a position in a large 
city. He lacked but the money to move. After 
^that — prosperity would be his. 

My mother did not deny him his chance, 
Musgrove himself, you see, having contrived 
it so that the chance was not without a certain 
advantage and privilege for her. So he made 
his fine bow, and he and his fine marquis man- 
ners were gone. 

I think my mother must have missed him. 
I know I did. The other pensioners came as 
regularly as ever — the gypsy with her grimy 
laces; the Jew with his tins and soap; rheu- 
matic darkies by the dozen, frankly empty- 
handed; the little girl with the thin legs and 
with the black shawl pinned over her head 
and draped down over the shy and empty bas- 
ket on her arm; and the old German inventor 

9 



Adventures in Indigence 

who always brought the tragedy of old and 
outworn hopes along with some new invention; 
or, at infrequent intervals, for a touch of color, 
there came an Italian organ-grinder, and — if 
the gods were good — a monkey. But there 
were times when I would have exchanged them 
all to see Musgrove again, with his fine pro- 
methean show of endurance, his incomparable 
assortment of unthinkable calamities. 

Another, it is true, came in his place, but 
he was of a wholly different type. He had not 
the old free manner of Musgrove, yet he was 
strangely appealing, too. He wore a beard and 
was stooped and spent and submissive, a man 
broken by fate. He did not complain. He 
did not wait rather grandly by the hall clock 
as Musgrove had done; no, but in the kitchen, 
about breakfast-time, biding the cook's not 
always cordial pleasure. 

In spite of my mother's sympathy, — which 
should certainly have made amends for any 
lack of it in the cook, — he had a way of slip- 
ping in and out with a little shrinking move- 
ment of his body, like the hound that does the 
same to escape a blow. One would have said 
that body and soul flinched. He limped stiffly, 



Musgrove 

and seemed always to have come a little dazed 
from far countries. 

My mother took even a very keen interest 
in him. This man was more difficult to reach, 
but by that very token seemed no doubt the 
more worthy. He told no wonderful tales to 
tax your credulity. His very reticence was 
moving and hard to endure ; the death of nine 
or seven children would have been less sad. He 
kept coming for quite a long time. Then the 
day dawned — a day quite like any other, I 
suppose, though it should have been dark with 
cloudy portent — when, by some slight mis- 
step, some trifling but old reference on his part 
when his mind was off its guard, my mother 
discovered, as by a sudden lightning flash, that 
this was Musgrove. 

I have known some dramatic moments in my 
life, but I would not put this low on the list. 

He seemed to know for an intense arrested 
instant that he had spoken a false line, that he 
had for a miserable moment forgotten his part. 
He staggered into it again with what I know 
now was fine courage, and managed in perfect 
character to get away. I can still see him as he 
departed, bent and submissive (having most 
II 



Adventures in Indigence 

meekly thanked my mother), and not forget- 
ting to limp stiffly, going along under the fall- 
ing leaves of the grape-arbor, in the autumn 
sunshine, the shadows of the stripped vines 
making a strange and moving pattern on his 
old coat as he went ; nor have I failed to see him 
in all the years since, thus departing, — in- 
evitably, irretrievably, — and have found my 
heart going many a time along with him. 

My mother, and I with my hand in hers, 
went back into the quiet comfortable rooms of 
that old house. But if you suppose we went in 
any spirit of ascendency, or righteous indig- 
nation, or justification, you are indeed mis- 
taken. To be in the right is such an easy, such 
a pleasant thing; what is difficult and must be 
tragically difficult to endure is to be artistically, 
tragically in the wrong. I think it likely that 
my mother remembered Musgrove, as I have 
done, through all the years, a little as a sur- 
vivor might remember one who had gone 
down before his eyes. It is thus, you see, that 
Musgrove, bent and always departing, still 
continues to sway others with his strange 
powers, as it is fitting, no doubt, that one of 
his rare genius should do. 



II 

THE HARP AND THE VIOLIN 

Besides those that I have mentioned, there 
were two especially of that ancient race whose 
fortunes were bound in with my early mem- 
ories. 

It was upon a day when I was a little more 
than fourteen that I came to know them. I 
was alone at home, save for the maids in the 
house, and was reading at my ease, as I loved 
to do, in that old verandah that fronted the 
south. I remember well that the book I read 
was " Rasselas, or The Happy Valley." 

The verandah was deep and long. Beside it 
ran a brick pavement, delightful in color and 
texture. Over this, joining the verandah, 
there curved a latticed grape-arbor of most 
gracious lines, on which grew, in lovely profu- 
sion, a wistaria, a catawba grape-vine, moon- 
flower, and traveler's-joy. When the wistaria, 
like a spendthrift, had lavished all its purple 
blossoms, and there were left but green leaves 
in its treasury, then the grape bloom lifted its 
fragrance ; and when this was spent, the travel- 
er's-joy, as though it had foreseen and saved 
13 



Adventures in Indigence 

for the event, flung forth its abundance; and 
when at last its every petal had fallen and 
nothing more remained, — for the moonflower 
had its own prejudice, persistently refused the 
demands of the sun, and would open its riches 
only to the moon and the night moths, — 
then the early autumn sun, feeling through the 
thinning leaves, hardly expectant, would come 
upon that best treasure of all, stored long, 
against this time, in the reddening clusters of 
the grapes. 

All these things lent I cannot say what charm 
inexhaustible to that old verandah, and made 
it a place of abiding romance and delight. The 
pattern of the sunshine and of the moonlight 
on the floor of it, as they fell through the lattice 
and the leaves, are things that still haunt my 
memory with the sense of a lovely security, of 
a generous abundance, and, as it were, of the 
lavish inexhaustible liberality of life itself. 

There, secure against interruption, I read 
and pondered, with the imaginative ponder- 
ings of fourteen, the strange longings of that 
Prince who should have been so content in the 
Happy Valley. 

As I read, I was aware of a strange intru- 
14 



The Harp and the Violin 

sion : a bent form in baggy trousers and rusty 
coat stooped under the weight of an old and 
worn harp; behind him, bent also, but by no 
visible burden, an old man with a violin en- 
tered the gateway of the arbor. They came 
very slowly and deliberately, yet without 
pause or uncertainty. They did not introduce 
themselves, being, I knew instantly, quite 
above such plebeian need. They asked no per- 
mission, nor solicited any tolerance. They 
spoke not a word. It was as if they had long 
outgrown the need of such earthly trivialities. 

He of the rusty coat and baggy trousers, 
having taken a slow look at the place around, 
— as though to establish in his mind some 
mysterious identity, — let the harp slip from 
his shoulders to the brick pavement, adjusted 
it there very deliberately, and proceeded to 
pluck one or two of its strings with testing 
fingers, still looking around carefully all the 
while; then he adjusted his camp-stool, seated 
himself, pulled the worn, yet delicate and fem- 
inine instrument toward him, so that her body 
lay against his shoulder, and put his hands in 
position to play. 

The old violin, more lordly, made no con- 
15 



Adventures in Indigence 

cession whatever to harmony; he tuned or 
touched not a string, but with a really kingly 
gesture put his instrument in the worn hollow 
of his shoulder, laid his head and cheek over 
against it, as though lending his whole soul to 
listen, raised the bow, held it for an immortal 
instant over the strings, and then drew out a 
long preliminary note — on, on, on, to the very 
quivering tip of the bow. 

My education had not been neglected as to 
music. There had always been much of it in 
my home, where flute and voice and harp and 
violin and piano spoke often, and my home 
town was near a great musical centre, where, 
young as I was, I had heard the best that was 
to be heard. Had I been in a critical mood, 
I should have noted how badly the long-drawn 
note was drawn; I can hear still how excru- 
ciating it was, how horribly it squawked; but 
rendered solemn, as I was, by the strangeness 
of their appearance and their presence, and 
dimly, dimly aware of their immortal powers, 
it thrilled me more than I remember those of 
Sarasate or Ysaye to have done. 

The long note at an end, without so much as 
a consultation of the eyes, they then began. 
i6 



The Harp and the Violin 

With never a word, only with thrilling tones 
horribly off the key, the violin spoke, say ra- 
ther wrung its hands and wailed, — "Oh, don't 
you remember" — ("Oh, yes; I remember!" 
throbbed and sobbed the harp) — "Sweet 
Alice, Ben Bolt?" 

They played it all through, even to what 
must have been the "slab of granite so gray," 
varying all the while from one half to one tone 
off the key, the old violin lending his ear as 
attentively all the while to the voice of his 
instrument as if she spoke with the tongues 
of angels; his dim veiled eyes fixed on incal- 
culable distances, like those of an eagle in 
captivity. 

The old harp, on the contrary, kept his eyes 

lowered stubbornly on the vibrating strings; 

and the harp, as he smote, quivered like some 

human thing struck upon its remembering 

heart. From the painfully reminiscent song 

they leaped without pause into that second 

most wailful melody in the world, — 

Ah, I have sighed to rest me, 
Deep in the quiet grave, — 

and played that on to the end also. 

But though to the outward eye these visitors 

3 17 



Adventures in Indigence 

played upon the harp and violin, how much 
more indeed did they play upon me ! Young, 
and sensitive, and as yet unsounded, how, 
with dim compelling fingers they searched 
and found and struck and drew from me emo- 
tions I had never known! Old and worn and 
bowed with life, and weather-beaten of the 
world, they played there in the mottled sun- 
light of that romantic arbor, as might Ulysses 
have stood mistaken and unhonored by those 
who had but heard of Troy. There was to me 
something suddenly overwhelming in the situa- 
tion. Oh, who was I, to enjoy so much, in such 
security; to feast upon plenty, and to know 
the generous liberality of life, while these, 
doomed to the duress of the gods, went through 
the world, day after day, half -starved, play- 
ing miserable memorable music fearfully off 
the key! 

Perhaps I was intense; certainly I was 
young; and as certainly I had all the eager 
vivid imagination of youth. Moreover, this 
was, it should not be overlooked, my very first 
adventure, all my own, with the poor; my first 
piece of entirely independent service to those 
mysterious powers. Meanwhile, the divinities 
i8 



The Harp and the Violin 

in disguise played on — a wild, boisterous 
tune it was now, set to a rollicking measure and 
infinitely more sad for that than the sighs of 
"Trovatore," or than sweet Alice under the 
stone. Bent they seemed on sounding every 
stop. You may think they were but a grimy 
pair, dull and squalid; probably embittered. 
I can' only tell you that they invoked for me 
that day, as with the mournful powers of the 
Sibyl of Cumae, love and life and death, and 
joy irrevocable, and memory — these they 
called up to pass before me, and bade them as 
they went, for one summoning moment, to re- 
veal their faces to me. 

Presently, I do not know with what dark 
thoughts, these two would have departed, but 
I remembered and begged them to stay. I 
flew upstairs and found my purse, and emptied 
it, and gave them what it held. They took it 
without thanks, merely as lawful tribute ex- 
acted. Again they would have departed, but 
I begged them still to remain. Should this an- 
cient Zeus and Hermes be allowed to depart 
without bread? I disappeared into the house 
with a beating heart. I found bread and milk 
and meat. I brought these and set them out 
19 



Adventures in Indigence 

for them, and drew chairs for them. All this, 
too, they took for granted, with some shrewd 
glances at me; they shuffled their feet about 
under the table, bent low to their plates like 
hungry men, and shoveled their food into their 
mouths dexterously with their knives, the bet- 
ter, no doubt, to disguise their divinity. 

While they ate, I went, with a heart troubled 
yet high, and gathered for them grapes that 
hung immortally lovely in the sun. These too 
they ate, with a more manifest pleasure, clean- 
ing the bunches down to the stems ; and when 
they had made away with all they could, 
slipped the remaining clusters in their pockets 
against a less hospitable occasion. 

I remember that then they went and left 
me standing there in a world of dreams and 
speculation and adventure. They had gone 
as they had come but me they left forever 
changed. As they departed, certain doors in 
my young days swung and closed mysteriously. 
For me the channels of life were permanently 
deepened. With them had departed my com- 
placent, inexperienced attitude of mind; with 
them had fared forth the care-free child that I 
had been. This adventure all my own, con- 

20 



The Harp and the Violin 

ducted in my own manner, had initiated me 
into vast possibilities, the more impressive 
because but dimly seen. On me had depended 
for a little while these two of God knows what 
ancient descent. I too had begun to know 
and taste life. I too would begin to count my 
memories. Oh, strange new world! And with 
strange people in it! 

On this world, enter, upper left stage, Leila 
the maid. 

"Oh , Miss Laura, honey, what you bin' doin' ? 
Dey ain't nothin' but no-'count beggars, chile. 
Don't you know dey mought 'a' come indo's 
and carried off all de silver? Dat 's just de kind 
would steal fum you when you warn't lookin'. 
I ain't right sho' now dey ain't got some o' de 
silver in dey pockets!" And she took savage 
stock of what lay on the table. 

O Leila, ingenuous mind ! Dearly as I loved 
her, how little she knew ! How far she was from 
understanding the habits and predilections of 
the gods! Would they trouble, do you think, 
to take a silver knife or fork, who can take 
away the priceless riches of childhood with 
them? Would they pause to purloin a mere 
petty silver spoon, who can carry off an entire 

21 



Adventures in Indigence 

golden period of your existence, and leave you 
with the leaden questions and dull philosophy 
and heavy responsibility of older years? 

I should have asked their names, that I 
might set these in my prayers, but I had not 
had presence of mind enough to do that; so, 
that night, while I knelt by my bed, alone in 
the moonlight, a very devout little girl, there 
stood there, shadowy in the shadows, and 
among my nearest and dearest, on whom I 
asked the Lord's blessing, the old harp and vio- 
lin; while, with my head buried passionately 
in my hands, I begged Providence to have an 
especial care of these new friends of my heart, 
to bless them, to let its face shine upon them, 
and to give them peace. 

Musical beggars! I have seen them often 
since, in one guise or another. Sometimes they 
trumpet on the trombone or cornet, or blow 
fearful blasts upon the French horn; I have 
known them to finesse upon the flute or flageo- 
let. These differences are but inconsiderable. 
Always I find them equally mighty. I have 
thought sometimes to get past them with 
giving them only a great deal more than I 
could afford. Useless frugality! futile econ- 

22 



The Harp and the Violin 

omy! For still they will be laying ghostly 
hands upon you; still will they be exacting a 
heavier tribute and demanding that gold and 
silver of the soul which, as Plato is so well 
aware, is how infinitely more precious. 

Though to outward appearance they are 
busy with their instruments, how they lay 
ghostly hands upon your imagination. How 
they conjure up before the inward eye them- 
selves as they might have been, to levy a new 
tax upon you. The man with the horn, he who 
plays always off the key, and always a little 
ahead of the others, he, it is now mysteriously 
revealed to you, had meant perhaps, at the 
very least, to play in an orchestra. And the 
baggy battered old violin was to have wiped 
his heated brow with a grand gesture, and 
bowed condescendingly over his collar to 
metropolitan audiences, had not his dreams so 
unaccountably miscarried . And the old thread- 
bare harp-player, his shabbiness and his bitter 
face to the contrary notwithstanding, had 
meant, had really meant, to pluck some 
sweetness out of life. And the harp itself (yes, 
even so extensive is the occult power they 
wield) makes its own special appeal to you, 
23 



Adventures in Indigence 

and with its taste for delicacy seems suddenly 
like a dull tormented thing, swaying and 
trembling under the stiff sullen fingers of its 
master, there on the garish pavement — an 
instrument which, but for the uncertainty of 
life (ah, the uncertainty of life!), might have 
responded how devotedly, in the tempered 
light of a curtained alcove, to the touch of deli- 
cate fingers. 

All this they conjure up before the mind's 
eye, ere they stop their excruciating playing. 
Then the violin, at the very moment that 
should have been his gracious one, counts the 
miserably few pennies. The sullen horn, his 
instrument tucked under his arm, goes on, 
still a stave ahead of the rest, a sodden expres- 
sion in his eyes. The old harpist swings the 
harp rudely over his shoulder, and gives the 
strap an extra twitch to ease the dull weight, 
and they are off to fresh pavements and dis- 
tricts new. I have seen great tragedians. I 
have sat through the sleep-walking scene in 
"Macbeth." I have heard Banquo knock. I 
have seen Juliet waken too late in the Capulet 
tomb and call for Romeo: **0 comfortable 
friar! Where is my lord?" In my schoolgirl 
24 



Major Lobley 

days I saw Booth in his great parts; but none 
of these master-scenes and fine harmonies have 
stirred in me so intolerable an emotion of pity 
or sense of fatality as an old horn, or harp 
and violin, grouped on a garish pavement, 
their lives dedicated to cheap music fearfully 
off the key. 

These are people of power, let appearances 
be what they may. You may patronize them 
if you like, and look upon them as the down- 
trodden and the dregs of existence. I am, in- 
deed, not so hardy. I have read a different 
fate in their groups and constellations. 

Ill 
MAJOR LOBLEY 

There were other poor whose influence was 
potent in my childhood, but I pass them by, 
to note but one more, of a curiously strong 
type, who crossed my path when I might have 
been about sixteen. She was a Salvation 
Army major, — Major Lobley, — and she 
had at her heels an army of poor wretches, 
''flood-sufferers." That great river on which 
my home town was situated had risen and 
25 



Adventures in Indigence 

overtrod its banks, spreading devastation. As 
it happened, my mother had standing idle at 
that time three or four small houses. Into these 
a large and variegated band of ''flood-suf- 
ferers" was assisted to move. They came, poor 
things, bringing their lares and penates. One, 
whom I take to have been an aristocrat among 
them, led a mule. Among them all, like a burst 
of sunshine over a dark and variegated land- 
scape, came Major Lobley and the drum. It 
would make a better recital, I know, if I said 
that she was beating it — but I am resolved to 
tell of things only as I remember them. The 
drum, however, even though silent, was to the 
eye sufficiently triumphant and sounding. 

My acquaintance with Major Lobley began 
the morning after her installation. We had al- 
ready, for the comfort of her clan, parted with 
all the available covers we could spare. She 
came seeking more. The maid brought me 
her name. I went into the parlor to receive 
her and to learn her errand. I take the liberty 
of reminding you that I was young and proud, 
with a traditional training and conventional 
pride. 

In that curtained and rather sombre room, 
26 



Major Lobley 

there sat Major Lobley, like a brilliant bit of 
sunshine. Before I knew what she was about, 
she was on her feet, had hold of both my hands, 
had kissed me on both cheeks, was holding me 
away from her a little, — a quick pleased ges- 
ture seen oftener on the stage than off it, — 
and was saying dazzllngly, "Sister! Are you 
saved?" 

They tell me that even the bravest at the 
Yser were demoralized by the first use of 
poisonous gases and other methods of warfare 
unknown, even undreamed of, by them; and 
a like panic is said to have seized the Ger- 
mans at earliest sight of the British armored 
monsters which ploughed over the ground dis- 
dainful of every obstacle, taking their own 
tracks with them. 

Major Lobley attacked me in a fashion I 
had never before even dreamed of. She was 
carrying her own tracks with her. None of my 
own aforethought invulnerable defenses were 
of the least use. She had thrown down and 
traversed the most ancient barriers. She had 
attacked me in the very intrenchments of my 
oldest traditions. Where were dignity, con- 
vention, pride of place, custom of behavior, 
27 



Adventures in Indigence 

and other supposedly impregnable defenses? 
Where were distinctions of class, fortifications 
of good taste, intrenchments of haughtiness? 
Where were reserve and other iron and con- 
crete and barbed -wire entanglements? I tell 
you, they were as though they were not! This 
glib inquiry about my soul routed me, demor- 
alized me so completely, that I do not even 
remember what I said. I only know that I 
fled precipitately for safety into the covert of 
the nearest subject. Was there anything she 
needed? And how could I serve her? 

At this she was eager. 

"Well, I'll tell you! We need another com- 
fort. Darius needs a comfort for his mule. 
Darius is a good man and his soul is saved. 
Now could n't you lend another comfort to the 
Lord?" 

"Yes," said I, in what now seems to me a 
kind of hypnotized state. "I think I can find 
another for you. " And I went myself and took 
it from my bed. 

She received it with hallelujahs and went 
away beaming, assuring me as she went, and as 
on the authority of an ambassador, that I 
would certainly have my reward. 
28 



Major Lobley 

I make no apology for all this. I know well 
that I was the weak and routed one. I know 
that this gypsy from nowhere, with her lack of 
advantages and her Cinderella training among 
the ashes and dregs of life, had me at an aston- 
ishing disadvantage. I know that, while I 
stood by, in my futile pride, she went off unac- 
countably, in a spangled coach, as it were, 
carrying with her salvation and all the satis- 
faction in the world, and happily possessed of 
the bed-covers without which I was to sleep 
somewhat chilly that night. 

But I think it due to myself to say that this 
weakness on my part was not single. For 
weeks, months, — as long as she stayed in the 
neighborhood, — Major Lobley swayed people 
as by a spell. One would have sworn her drum- 
stick was a wand. In theory, and out of her 
presence, we younger ones declared her pre- 
suming and impossible, but were reduced to 
serve her whenever she appeared. My mother 
and my elder sister, who were experienced and 
better judges, continued to give her and her 
thin ragged ranks daily help. Pans of biscuit, 
pots of soup, drifted in that northwesterly 
direction as by some gulf stream of sympathy 
29 



Adventures in Indigence 

which you might speculate and argue about 
all you liked, but whose course remained mys- 
tical and unchanged. 

One point I must not fail to mention. I had 
worried somewhat concerning Darius's mule. 
There was, I knew, no shelter for him save a 
tiny woodshed just about half his size. I pic- 
tured him standing there, with only his fore- 
quarters or hindquarters sheltered, and the 
rest of him the sport of the elements and the 
biting weather. Needless anxiety; futile con- 
cern! I might have read a different fate for 
him in Orion and Pleiades! Such anxiety comes 
of thinking too meanly of life. Darius had a 
better opinion of it, and it may be with better 
cause. Perhaps he argued that a power that 
was able to save his soul was perfectly well 
able to look after his mule; and rendered ex- 
pectant by this belief, Darius's eyes saw what 
my less faithful ones would certainly have 
overlooked, namely, that the comfortable 
kitchen of the little house, with its sunshine 
and its neat wainscoting, made an ideal abid- 
ing-place for his friend. Here, therefore, posi- 
tively benefiting by misfortune and like an ani- 
mal in a fairy tale, the mule of Darius abode, 
30 



Major Lobley 

and, no doubt, more comfortably than ever in 
his life before; and even if his meals con- 
tinued to be meagre, he was enabled to eke 
them out with a generous attention to the 
wainscoting. 

You see ! What can be said of a people like 
that, able to turn the most unlikely things to 
strange and immediate uses, for all the world 
as the fairy godmother did the pumpkin and 
the mice! 

What stands out most clearly, as I remem- 
ber Major Lobley, is neither her scoop-bon- 
net, nor the drum, nor her solicitude for my 
soul, but rather the way she managed, say 
rather contrived, to have us to do whatever 
she wanted us to do. This was not accom- 
plished by tact, not by craft, not even by in- 
telligence, certainly, I think, not by pity. It 
was rather, I am persuaded, something ancient 
and inherited, and not acquired in Major Lob- 
ley 's brief span ; something, rather, dating back 
to gypsy centuries, God knows how many 
aeons ago — something that had ruled and tri- 
umphed, with sounding and loud timbrel, on 
countless occasions before now; some freedom, 
some innate self-approval; some linking, it 
31 



Adventures in Indigence 

would almost seem, of the powers of poverty 
with the powers of the Deity. 

Have it as you will, the finer appearance 
still clings to the improvident. They give you 
color and incident without your asking; they 
scatter romance and wonder with largesse, as 
kings. As mere memorable characters, were 
not the old blind man and Musgrove and Ma- 
jor Lobley worth the money and the anxiety 
they cost us? And who will contend that Da- 
rius's tradition is not to be valued above a 
mere strip of wainscoting and the cost of a few 
repairs? 

I have long believed that iEsop needs re- 
writing in many instances, and very especially 
in that of "The Grasshopper and the Ant." 
What should be told — since ^sop's creatures 
are intended to exemplify human behaviors 
and draw human morals — is how the Grass- 
hopper spent the winter with the Ant, and ate 
up all the Ant's preserves and marmalades, 
and fiddled nightly and gayly by the Ant's 
fire, and managed somehow to make the Ant 
feel that the privilege had been all her own, to 
have labored long for the benefit of so inter- 
esting and so gifted a gentleman. 
32 



Major Lobley 

I can recall from time to time, all through 
my childhood and girlhood, that I and mine 
made a kind of festival of a like circumstance, 
and how gladly we toiled for the benefit of that 
class which might be said to winter perpetu- 
ally on our sympathies. I do not allude merely 
to tableaux, fairs, private theatricals, musi- 
cales, and the like, given for the benefit of those 
who neither sowed nor gathered into barns. I 
would be afraid to say how many times, from 
my early years, I was for their sake a spangled 
fairy, a Queen Elizabeth court dame, an 
"Elaine," white, pallid, on a barge, dead of un- 
requited love, a Gainsborough or Romney por- 
trait, or a Huguenot lady parting from her 
lover, or a demure "Priscilla," or a dejected 
"Mariana," or a shaken-kneed reciter of 
verses, or a trembling performer on the piano. 
I remember that there was a huge trunk in the 
old attic at home given over to nothing but 
amateur theatrical properties. I remember 
coming home often from dragging, wearisome 
rehearsals, how tired, but happy! What fun 
it was to toil and practise and rehearse and 
labor until your Httle bones ached "for the 
benefit of — !" 

4 33 



Adventures in Indigence 

" For the benefit of " ! I tell you it is a magic 
phrase ! I remember my mother coming home 
again and again, — from some charitable con- 
clave I suppose, — radiant and eager, as she so 
often was, to announce that we were once more 
to be permitted to labor in response to its 
magic. Once, after her attendance on some 
missionary meeting, it was conveyed to us that 
we were to be allowed to dress fifty dolls "for 
the benefit of" as many gregarious little 
grasshoppers of Senegambia, to the end that 
their Christmas and our own should be the 
happier. 

It had all the air of a fine adventure. It was 
a fine adventure. I really would not have 
missed it. Yet unless you have dressed, let us 
say, thirty dolls, and know that twenty more 
remain naked, you can hardly guess how doll- 
dressmaking may hang heavy, even on the 
most eager fingers. I can still see them all 
in their pretty and varied dresses, ranged tri- 
umphant at last on top of the old square piano, 
that we might behold the labor of our hands — 
their feet straight ahead of them, their eyes 
fixed, staring but noncommittal, supposedly 
on Senegambia. 

34 



Major Lobley 

It seems to me now a gay, even though at 
the same time a somewhat futile, thing to 
have done; but turn it as you will, the true 
privilege was ours. 

We and our forebears, you see, had in per- 
fect innocence laid by a few stores through the 
generations. We had preserved and retained 
certain standards and comfortable customs 
and conveniences of living; certain traditions, 
too, of education and treasures of understand- 
ing ; by which token it became our privilege to 
entertain and provide for those cicada souls 
who had followed the more romantic profes- 
sion of fiddling; and that we might have our 
privilege to the full, we were graciously per- 
mitted to set out preserves, not merely for the 
swarming grasshoppers of our own land : it was 
vouchsafed us to sustain and supply with dolls 
and other delights the appealing little grass- 
hoppers of Senegambia. 

Recalling all my childhood and girlhood ex- 
perience with the poor, I am led by every 
path of logic to believe that they have some 
secret power of their own — some divine right 
and authority by which they rule, beside which 
the most ancient dynasties are but tricks of 
35 



Adventures in Indigence 

evanescence, and the infallibility of the Pope 
a mere political exigency. The powers they 
wield would seem to me unique. Show me a 
dictatorship, empire, oligarchy, system, or a 
suzerainty, seignory or pashawlic, which pre- 
sides over and possesses anything commen- 
surate with their realm; which sways and 
commands anything comparable to their wide 
dominion ! 

Will you show me any other people outside 
of the fairy-books who can put the most fear- 
ful calamity on like a cloak and doff it at will, 
who can augment their families to seven or 
eight children overnight, and reduce them as 
readily to five or six the following day, if it 
but seem to them advisable? Where outside 
their ranks is there any one capable of per- 
suading you that it is a privilege to sleep cold 
so that some Darius you never saw or care to 
see shall, he and his allegorical mule, go better 
warmed? Who else, being neither of your kith 
nor kin, has such power over you that, with a 
mere bloodshot eye and shiver of the shoulders, 
he can turn your automobile, your furs, your 
warmth, and all your pleasant pleasures into 
Dead Sea apples of discomfort? Or, did any of 
36 



Major Lobley 

your own class, by merely playing '' Ben Bolt," 
raggedly and horribly off the key, under a 
grape-arbor, exercise so great a power over you 
that, having given him what you had, you 
went awed and chastened of all vanity, and 
set his name in your prayers that night as the 
Church service does the king? Are these people 
of rank who can do this? Or will you still cling 
to your aristocracies? 

It is likely that I shall be accused of senti- 
mentality. Some will say that to talk of the 
power of the poor is but cruel irony. If I would 
speak wisely and not as one of the foolish wo- 
men, let me live and work among the poor, or 
better still, be of them. This is the only way 
fairly to judge them. 

I am of a like opinion ; and am therefore re- 
solved to ask you to let me speak of a later 
time when I myself was poor, and of the wider 
knowledge of the powers of the poor which 
that circumstance afforded me. For, in my ad- 
vantageous days, I was permitted only to serve 
the poor, the discouraged, the improvident; 
later, I was promoted to be, at least in a meas- 
ure, of their fellowship. 



37 



IV 
MAMIE FAFFELFINGER 

The nouveaux pauvres are, I believe, as a 
rule, fully as awkward with their poverty as 
the nouveaux riches with their wealth. They 
have not the true grand manner. They are not 
a whit more born to the rags than your sud- 
denly prosperous parvenu to the purple. It is 
difficult to be at ease with them. Their be- 
haviors, their manners, their speech, more of- 
ten their silences, are forever reminding you of 
their former mode of living. 

For these and other reasons, I willingly pass 
over those intervening years, when, though 
distinctly poor, I was unaccustomed, and wore 
my changed conditions, I do not doubt, awk- 
wardly. I pass on to a later and more fixed 
season when, thrown wholly now on my own 
resources, and totally untrained and unfitted 
for such an emergency, I made shift to support 
myself, to live meagrely, and to endure what I 
took to be a well-nigh intolerable poverty. 

Poverty is a variable term and much sub- 
ject to comparison. Some will allow it only to 
those who have been born to it. To have been 
38 



Mamie F a f f e 1 f in g e r 

always half-starved, these think, and to carry 
a basket from door to door — that is to be poor. 
But it is idle to think of cold and hunger to 
the point of beggary as the only cold and 
hunger there are. Not alone are there degrees 
of cold and hunger of the body, — discom- 
fortable and ill-nourished living, — but there 
are, as well, things which seem to me even more 
difficult to endure — unsatisfied hunger of the 
mind and heart and a most cruel and per- 
sistent chill of the spirit. The literal-minded 
may need to see the open sore, the sightless 
eye, or the starved countenance, before their 
pity is moved; but he who has ever touched 
the spiritual values will know — with a tender- 
ness that is mercy — that in one who never 
asked for pity, one who perhaps even went 
outwardly gay, there may be hidden hurts 
borne unflinchingly ; intolerable darknesses not 
complained of; crippled powers which once 
went proud and free; and a heart and mind 
which have endured, it may be, starved hours. 
These are, I believe, some of the most real 
poverties that the soul may be called on to 
endure. 

Yet, God forbid that, having tasted some of 
39 



Adventures in Indigence 

them, I should not bear true witness! There 
are some hidden springs in these also. Here 
also, in what you would take to be so dry, so 
arid a land, there will have been wells and 
fountains, and locusts and honey for those cut 
off from their kind. But of these things I would 
speak later. I wish at present to tell of my 
further adventures with the poor, when I my- 
self had become more nearly one of them. 

Under the conditions I have mentioned my 
life had of course changed greatly. Most of 
the old fond bonds were broken ; but there were 
new and even closer ones to be assumed, 
newer and larger responsibilities to be under- 
taken. 

In every circumstance of our lives lies the 
stirring knowledge that one's own case, how- 
ever strange, is far from being singular. There 
are others besides myself with whom Poverty 
has taken up its abode; there are others from 
whose cup Despair has daily drunk; who, look- 
ing up from their daily bread, have found Sor- 
row's eyes forever on them. Those who have 
known these cup-companions need not be told 
how the House of Life can be darkened, or how 
these darker presences occupy the chambers of 
40 



Mamie Faffelfinger 

the mind. Nor need they yet be reminded how 
all this becomes bearable, even enduringly 
precious to the heart, if Love but remains, and 
consents still to sit at the board, and, though 
with brows bent, still breaks bread with its 
white hands, and lifts in its unshaken fingers the 
cup of bitter wine. 

We went to live in the deep country, on 
what had once been a beautiful old estate. 
The house had not been lived in for years. It 
still preserved an air of beauty and dignity, 
but its ancient pride and fitness were turned 
toward decay. But if, like myself, it had fallen 
on adversity and evil fortune, that was but the 
better reason I should understand and love it. 
Wholly without what the world calls comforts, 
yet how comforting it was in those chill and 
cheerless times! Downfallen in the eyes of 
others, lowered from its proud estate, how I 
have yet lifted my heart up to it under the 
stars, and paid it an homage of love and thank- 
fulness not matched, I think, in all its better 
days. 

Our precarious means being entirely de- 
pendent on such writing as I could do, it would 
have been extravagance and bankruptcy for 
41 



Adventures in Indigence 

me to assume the domestic duties. There 
was no one else. I was the only woman of the 
household. It seemed to me that a working 
housekeeper might solve the difficulty; one of 
that variety which lays not so much stress 
upon wages as upon a home. I found a sur- 
prising number with this tendency. In an- 
swer to a most modest advertisement, I re- 
ceived sixty-four answers. Those whom, in the 
course of time, I at last engaged, were in each 
case women who had seen happier conditions 
and were by their own affidavits capable of 
standing anything. But I found them to be, 
without exception, shrinkingly susceptible to 
physical discomforts, and of these there were 
in that old house many. 

These women were nouveaux paiwres of a 
middle-class order and had all the crudities of 
their condition. Each of them carried with her 
a remnant of her "better days," as an invet- 
erate shopper carries an out-of-date sample, 
resolved, yet unable, to find its match. One of 
them could not forget, and had no mind to let 
you forget, that her husband had made four 
thousand a year; another had been to school 
in Paris; and one always wore rubber gloves, 
42 



Mamie Faffelfinger 

"because," she assured me, "as long as I can 
have my hands white, I can stand a great deal." 
Another insisted on the most fluffy and un- 
substantial desserts, and thought the rest of 
the meal mattered little, so long as the finale 
had a grand air. Another could not endure the 
odor of onions and fainted at the sight of liver. 
Yet another, from reverses and humiliations 
unendurable, had turned Christian Scientist. 
I learned afterward that she came hoping to 
convert me to the idea that there is no poverty. 
I wish I could have spared her the futility. 

By and by I abandoned all hope of a working 
housekeeper. I knew that what I needed was 
a "general houseworker." 

Those who in extremity have sought serv- 
ants in city employment bureaus need not be 
told what is too old a tale. When the array of 
imposing applicants had all declined the dis- 
comforts of my home, and the honor of being 
employed by me, the manager explained, what 
I was dull not to have known myself, that it 
might be wise to try some of the employment 
bureaus in the poorer quarters. I found one 
finally at the head of the Bowery, and climbed 
its rickety stairs. 

43 



Adventures in Indigence 

They were a strange and varied lot that I 
came upon now: weird old flat-footed fairies, 
given to feathers and elaborate head-dresses, 
or young heavy Audreys who looked at you 
out of dull eyes. I explained elaborately the 
conditions under which they would be called 
on to live. I omitted nothing, not even the 
screech-owls, or the night sounds that might 
or might not be wild cats. They came eagerly 
or sullenly, according to their dispositions. 
But apparently none of them had at all 
grasped what I said. For when they saw 
the place, and felt the loneliness of which 
I had so thoroughly warned them, they 
turned and fled. The house might have been 
haunted. 

Finally I heard that one could engage serv- 
ants of a certain order from the Charities as- 
sociations, such as the Society for Improving 
the Condition of the Poor. To one of these 
I went. 

The matron, a full-eyed woman who gave 
the impression of having to discipline an over- 
kind heart by an assumption of great severity, 
questioned me curtly. What surroundings had 
I to offer? My heart sank, but I went over 
44 



Mamie Faffelfinger 

faithfully the disadvantages — the extreme 
loneliness of the life, the necessity that those 
who entered on it should abandon all hope of 
"movies." "Movies" there were not within 
twelve miles. There were no conveniences, no 
department stores, no bargain sales, nothing 
— only field and forest, stars and dawns and 
sunsets — nothing ! 

She lifted explanatory eyebrows, a little dis- 
pleased, I thought. 

" I mean the moral surroundings." Then, at 
my pause, "I mean, are you yourself a Chris- 
tian woman?" 

This was no Major Lobley. It is certain that 
she cared not a pin whether I was "saved." 
She merely had it in mind to do her duty by 
her flock. It was her duty to see that the poor, 
whose condition was to be improved, were 
placed in Christian homes. 

Being perhaps the better satisfied on this 
point, for a rather faltering answer on my part, 
she sent a mild-eyed assistant for "Mamie 
Faffelfinger." 

She meanwhile explained in a businesslike 
way that Mamie was a Catholic, brought up in 
an orphan asylum; her child was not a year 
45 



Adventures in Indigence 

old; "the man" — (so the matron designated 
him curtly) — was not her husband. 

"You mean she would wish a home for the 
child too?" 

The full-eyed woman ceased turning her 
pencil between her thumb and fingers on the 
desk and gave me an aggressive look. 

"Certainly. Most of these people have n't 
a crust to live on. If you do not wish to 
employ that kind, there are the employment 
bureaus." 

So they dawned on me like a blessing. These 
were not parvenu poor who had been to school 
in Paris, who would insist on unsubstantial 
desserts. Here were no head-dressy old fairies 
of questionable powers; these were no exotic 
fruits of the "gardens of Proserpine"; here 
was the good salt brine, here the ancient tides 
of reality — "the surge and thunder of the 
Odyssey." 

Meanwhile the matron was speaking: — 

"The man is not her husband. But if you 
are a Christian, I am sure you have no narrow 
scruples as to that. He drinks. She is half- 
starved. I have told her we will get her and 
the child a place, if she will promise to leave 
46 



Mamie Faffelfinger 

him." She glanced at the open doorway of her 
tiny office: "Yes, Mamie, come in." 

It was then that I first saw Mamie and Anne. 

Mamie looked her part. She was pallid, 
rather pretty; very slight, with a skin of ex- 
treme fineness. She had heavy-lidded eyes, 
that looked to have seen much weeping, and 
a smile the more pathetic for its great readi- 
ness. 

As to Anne, a consistent story would require 
that she should be as pallid as her mother, that 
her little hand, intent now on her mother's 
hat-brim, should be a mere kite's claw; and 
there should have been delicate dark rings 
under her eyes. But, far from being a kite's 
claw, the hand on the hat-brim was as plump 
as ripe fruit, and her cheeks were like smooth 
apricots perfect with the sun. But, after all, 
there is no describing Anne. If you will look 
at the child held in the arms of the Madonna of 
the Chair and then at the one in the arms of 
the Sistine Madonna; then, if you will picture 
a child not quite a year old, who might worth- 
ily be the little sister and companion of these, 
you will have some idea, even though inade- 
quate still, of what Anne was, as she held tight 
47 



Adventures in Indigence 

to Mamie's rakish hat-brim and gave me the 
solemn attention of her eyes. 

I went over the requirements. I spoke of 
the loneUness. Not a town within miles. 

"Well, what do you think of that!" Mamie 
replied. But she was unfeignedly eager to 
come. 

"When could you be ready?" 

"Oh, right away," she said. "I've got 
Anne's clothes here." She glanced at a small 
paper bundle under one arm. 

My good fairy, who pays me occasional 
visits, prevented my asking her where her own 
clothes were. 

The matron interposed. Mamie could stay 
right there until I was ready to take her, late 
that afternoon. Then, when Mamie had gone 
into the outer room, the matron explained. 

"She has n't any home to go to. He left her 
and raised money on her furniture. They came 
and took it. She has n't even a stick of it." 

Tragic as this was, my mind was for the mo- 
ment intent on something else. 

"But she wears a wedding ring!" I said. 

The matron pulled a heavy ledger toward 
her. 

48 



Mamie Faffelfinger 

"Oh, yes; they all do. They'd go starved, 
but they'd buy a wedding ring." 

She pressed her Ups together, shook her 
head, and began setting down data, — my 
name, address, occupation, the names of two 
of my friends, — they must be people of some 
standing, who could vouch for me; then more 
as to Mamie, I suppose, in the interest of sys- 
tem and statistics. 

I can give you no idea of the comradeship of 
that journey with Mamie and Anne. Mamie 
looked delightedly out of the car-window, not- 
ing the most trifling points of interest with en- 
thusiasm, and saying every little while, "Well, 
what do you think of that!'' Or she would ex- 
citedly point out some speeding bird, or flit- 
ting house, or other flying object, to Anne, and 
Anne would lurch forward to look, her little 
nose sometimes touching the pane, and then 
would turn good-naturedly and look at me, 
with every air of asking me if that probably 
so-interesting object had managed to escape 
me also. 

When we arrived at the house, Mamie was 
as cheerful as a sparrow. The room on which 
flat-footed fairies and dull Audreys had looked 
s 49 



Adventures in Indigence 

with unconcealed contempt or disapproval, 
she flew to. She settled in it like a bird in her 
nest, and chirped contentedly to Anne, — 

"Oh, Anne, look at the nice bureau! And 
the washstand! What do you think of that!'' 
Then she turned to me, with that winning com- 
radely smile: "I like bureaus and washstands 

— furniture, I mean, and things. It makes you 
think of home." And she drew her hand along 
the bureau. 

I did not know then, but I soon found out, 
that this was the top and bottom of all her 
longings, and this the real hunger of her heart, 

— a hunger starved enough, of course, in all 
her orphan-asylum years, — a craving for a 
place of her own. 

Mamie talked much of "Bill." He filled her 
life and days, there could be no doubt. If she 
swept, it was to his glory. If she scrubbed a 
floor or kneaded dough, or bent affectionately 
over the scalloping of a pie-crust, it was cer- 
tainly for love of him that she lent these her 
attention. She soon began sending him her 
weekly earnings. I remonstrated, and suggest- 
ed that it might be better to save her money 
against another rainy day. She dusted her 
50 



Mamie Faffelfinger 

hands of flour and began scraping the bread- 
board , vigorously, with the strength of her whole 
body. I waited for my reply. At last it came. 

"Well, I will say you've been good to me, 
and Anne loves you — but I think you Ve got 
a hard heart." 

Secretly I agreed with her. I retrenched and 
urged her to send only a part of her money, 
saving the rest for furniture. Of course, I knew 
by this time that the word ' ' furniture ' ' was to 
her like magic and a charm. 

Meanwhile, fond as she was of Anne and 
proud of her, Mamie was bent on not spoiling 
her. She used to put her in a wooden tub in the 
sunshine on the floor of the kitchen, as Peter 
Pumpkin-Eater put his wife in the pumpkin 
shell ; and like Peter, there she kept her very 
well. And Anne, more ingenuous and happier 
than Diogenes, — for she liked it and crowed 
if people came into her sunshine, — would 
stay there perfectly happy and delighted for 
the greater part of the day, playing with an 
apple or a potato. I really never saw such a 
baby. 

Meanwhile, although Bill was, it seems, 
drinking more than ever, with the aid, of 

51 



Adventures in Indigence 

course, of Mamie's earnings, Mamie herself 
contrived to be above fact and experience, and 
was sure he was actively reforming. In a 
sense she really lived a charmed life. 

It seemed that Fate and fact could deal her 
no blov/ which would finally affect her. She 
knew Bill's failings better than the matron, by 
a great deal; but if you suppose that these 
could spoil the pure romance of life for her, 
or invalidate her dream of a home and furni- 
ture of her own, cushioned chairs owned and 
sat upon by the reformed Bill and herself, you 
are much mistaken. 

She was a firm believer in miracles. " I know 
you don't believe in them," she would say; 
"but at the Orphan Asylum there was a statue 
of Saint Stephen that used to turn around 
over night, it really did, if it was pleased with 
what you did." 

Like so many of her class, Mamie had an 
incorrigible tendency toward rumor. Knowl- 
edge comes not to these by laborious delving 
of their own, but appears to be delivered to 
them out of the air as by bird auguries, and 
by all manner of unauthenticated hearsay 
infinitely rather to be trusted than fact. I take 
52 



Mamie Faffelfinger 

this to be in their case a survival of what was 
believed, in ancient times, to be speech with 
Divinity. However it may shock the modern 
mind to read of the Almighty giving out to 
Moses, not merely the majestic laws graven 
on tables of stone, but commands and detail 
and measurement of great exactness as to the 
stuff and manner of fashioning and trimming 
the High Priest's breeches, to the minds of 
Mamie and her class there would be in this 
little that was shocking, they themselves be- 
lieving and delighting in Divine collaboration 
in even the most homely matters. 

Anne wore on a string about her neck a 
little square of Canton flannel which in the 
course of many months had become ex- 
tremely grimy. I suggested as tactfully as I 
could that this was not in keeping with the 
laws of health, and might be, with a view to 
germs, a positive danger to Anne. 

Mamie smiled happily, indulgently. 

"That's just where you're wrong! It's to 
protect her from danger — specially danger by 
drowning!" 

Once I suggested that, if I were she, I would 
not feed Anne burned bread-crusts. 
53 



Adventures in Indigence 

"Oh, but they say they're good for a baby; 
they say they're splendid for the digestion." 

Useless to argue. She had always heard so. 
"They" said so. 

So it is that knowledge comes to them, not 
laboriously, as does our own, but by easy ru- 
mor, floating hearsay; and wisdom is brought 
to them without effort of their own, as viands 
to a king. They are fed by ravens. Their 
gourd grows overnight. Messengers still come 
and go between heaven and earth to instruct 
them. There is not required of them, the 
laboring class, that slavish mental toil exacted 
of the world's great intellects. Angels and 
ministers of grace, however they may have 
abandoned the wise, do still, it seems, defend 
them. They have only to be of a listening 
mind and a believing heart, and they shall 
know what is good for digestion, and what 
will save their children from drowning. 

Mamie, further, was able to maintain a re- 
markable equilibrium between respectful serv- 
ice as a servant and what might have been the 
gracious democracy of a ruler. She taught 
Anne to call me "Honey," and had it as a sur- 
prise for me one morning. I will not deny that 
54 



The Lure of the Chiffoneer 

it was a surprise. But if you think that so sweet 
an appellation in Anne's bird-like voice, her 
golden head leaning over into the sunshine as 
she heard my step, seemed to me to be lack- 
ing in dignity, then you and I are of contrary 
opinions. 

One day, when Mamie was dusting where 
hung a Fra Lippo Madonna, Anne pointed a 
fat finger at it, demanding, "Honey?" 

Mamie did not even pause. 

"No," she said briskly, "that's not Honey. 
That's Lord and Lord's mawma." 

V 
THE LURE OF THE ** CHIFFONEER '' 

One day, Mamie came to me, her face beam- 
ing. 

" I want to do the right thing, so I 'm going 
to give you a whole month's notice. Bill has 
rented some rooms. What do you think of 
that!" 

I told her gently, but firmly, what I suspect- 
ed concerning it. 

She brought out his letter for proof. 

" He 's to pay for the rooms, and I 'm to send 
55 



Adventures in Indigence 

him the money for the furniture. He'll get 
whatever kind I like. You've always been 
kind to me," she added, "but I think you've 
got a hard heart as to Bill." 

Well, perhaps I had. 

The month passed very happily. As his let- 
ters came, she would tell me what he had 
bought. 

" It 's a bureau with a marble top, — second- 
hand, Second Avenue, — but as good as new. 
Besides, some people would rather have an- 
tiques. And I do like bureaus!" 

Then it would be a table that set her sing- 
ing her queer ragtime songs. Once there came 
word of three cushioned chairs. One letter an- 
nounced a looking-glass. And once, as I went 
into the kitchen suddenly, there was Mamie, 
one arm above her head, the other holding her 
skirt, dancing for Anne to see, and to Anne's 
inexpressible wonder and delight. She sat 
there in her tub, leaning forward, beaming, 
fascinated, and holding tight to its sides as 
though we might all be personages in a fairy- 
tale, and she and the tub might any moment 
fly away. 

At sight of me, Mamie stopped, flushing 
56 



The Lure of the Chiffoneer 

pink as a rose, apologetic, but unfeignedly 
happy. 

"I couldn't help it! He's bought me a 
chiffoneer!'' 

A moment later, as I passed through the 
hall, I could hear Mamie singing, "And she's 
going back to her Daddy, and her home, home, 
home!'' — to some impromptu rigmarole tune 
of her own. 

Soon after this she took the train to the 
nearest town and came back laden with pack- 
ages — all manner of cheap household stuff 
picked up at the five-and-ten-cent store. It 
occurred to me that she might as well have 
a small empty trunk of mine that there was 
in the attic. She was delighted with the gift, 
and wore the key of it on a chain around her 
neck. 

"I'd rather have that key than a locket!" 
she said, putting her hand over it affection- 
ately. It was so that she repaid you tenfold. 
"It's wonderful," she would say, every little 
while, in joyful anticipation, "having your own 
home!" 

For myself, despite many unmitigated reali- 
ties, I could not help feeling that I was living 
57 



Adventures in Indigence 

in something of a wonder story. Who knew 
but that, with those extraordinary powers of 
hers, which so readily rose above fact, who 
knew but that she might rub that key some 
day as Aladdin his lamp, and turn us all into 
triumphant heroes and heroines. 

Mamie did not forget, as I said good-bye to 
her in the big city terminal where I finally 
left them, to give me parting advice, sisterly 
sympathy : — 

"Now, don't you go and get discouraged. 
I know you've had troubles. Well, I've had 
trouble enough, too. You just keep right on, 
and hold your head high. There's no telling 
what '11 come to them that holds their heads 
high. Look at me!" 

I looked at her and could have felt con- 
vinced. Then we said our good-byes, and 
away they went. The last I saw of them in the 
crowd was Anne's hand still waving loyally 
to me over Mamie's shoulder quite a long 
time after her eyes had lost me. 

I missed them exceedingly; and the blue- 
birds of that second spring hardly made up 
to me for the absence of Anne's birdlike voice. 
The new maid, Margaret, was interesting 
58 



The Lure of the Chiffoneer 

enough, but no one could ever quite take the 
place of those others. 

With all this in mind, you will realize with 
what a sinking of the heart I found that there 
was more than Mamie to be missed. There 
could be no doubt in the matter, for there had 
been no outsider in the house at all of late; 
therefore it could be due to no other magic 
than hers that there was a grievous lessening 
of my scant stores of household belongings — 
sheets and pillow-cases, towels and a pair of 
blankets, napkins and, I think, a table-cloth, 
and some muffin-rings and kitchen conven- 
iences, and I do not know what else. 

Little bits of reality came drifting back to 
me — the key kept so faithfully always 
around her neck; my own gift of the trunk; 
and the sentiment — say now, if you like, the 
sentimentality — with which I had noted the 
fact that even that rather small trunk was too 
large for her poor belongings. 

Then suddenly, the whole episode read to 
me like an Uncle Remus " Br'er Fox and Br'er 
Rabbit" tale, and I was not too discouraged to 
laugh — as the "Little Boy" is recorded al- 
ways to have done — at the turn of the story, 
59 



Adventures in Indigence 

at the inevitable triumph of the cleverer of the 
two. 

Yet for Mamie's sake, not to speak of my 
own, such an ending was not to be permitted. 
I had asked her to come to see me in town on 
one of the days of the week that I was always 
there, and to be sure to bring Anne to see me. 
She had assured me that she would, and that 
she would never forget me. Now I knew it 
would be necessary, rather, for me to go and 
find her. I rehearsed the scene mentally. I 
meant to tell her that she could keep all the 
things she had stolen. (Let them remain in the 
manner of coals of fire in her trunk !) I would 
first reduce her to powder in a solemn and 
serious manner, and then strew her upon the 
winds of my righteous indignation ! She whom 
I had treated with unfailing kindness! She 
whom in sickness I had nursed! She whose 
many faults had been forgiven her, and in 
whom I had placed trust ! She! — 

Strangely enough, she did come to see me, 
that very next day I was in town. She seemed 
eager to get to me; nervous, too, like one 
whipped of her conscience. I felt my heart 
suddenly softening, and as quickly hardened 
60 



The Lure of the C h i f f o n e e r 

it. I really had not expected quick penitence 
of her, but even so, she must take the full pun- 
ishment of my disapproval. There is a duty 
we owe in such matters. I would make noth- 
ing easy for her. 

She sat down heavily, then suddenly put 
her hand over quickly on mine. I made no 
sign. Not even that should move me. Then 
in a hoarse whisper, a really hoarse whisper, 
almost a moan, she said, — 

"Oh, how shall I tell you? How shall I tell 
you?" 

Stony pause. I looked coldly at her. It 
seemed, for a moment, that the irresistible 
force really had met the immovable body. 
Then all at once, she put her head down on 
her arm, sobbed, and spoke. 

"There was n't any bureau! There was nH 
any chiff oneer ! There was n't even any rooms ! ' ' 

An instant of time swirled past. Then I 
knew, as of old, that the powder of the poor is 
an irresistible force, never — never — not even 
by the immovable body of our strongest deter- 
minations, to be withstood. My own iron re- 
solves I saw converted suddenly into the flim- 
siest fiction — rent gossamer floating wide. 
6i 



Adventures in Indigence 

Oh! Oh! I could have put my face in my 
hands and wept. All her dreams gone ! All her 
hopes! her pride! her cherished plans! her 
money ! her faith — everything ! How small 
the theft of a few pillow-cases and towels look- 
ed now that, at Fate's hands, she, poor thing, 
had had all this stolen from her! This was no 
time to reduce her to powder, when she was 
already reduced to floods of tears and I by 
no means far from the verge of them. 

The story is too obvious to tell. Mamie's 
miracle had failed. The unreformable Bill had 
not reformed. But neither, — I hasten to add, 
— neither, it seems, was Mamie's ineradicable 
desire for a home eradicated. I have men- 
tioned before my belief that Fate cannot 
finally affect the people of this extraordinary 
class. I believe them all to have been plunged 
more effectually than Achilles in some pro- 
tective flood. 

Mamie, with the help of the perpetually 
severe, perpetually tender-hearted matron, 
went out to work again. But there may be 
those who would be more interested to know 
what I did with my resolves, my righteous 
indignation, and, above all, with my con- 
62 



The Lure of the Chiffoneer 

science. As to my conscience, I cleared that. 
I wrote to the matron, warning her that in 
assigning Mamie to any place, it should be 
remembered that, valuable as Mamie was in 
many ways, she had a light-fingered tendency 
to collect household goods. From my later 
knowledge, I believe that the matron may 
have smiled at the ingenuousness of that. It 
might readily be thought superfluous to warn 
the expert physicist that water does not run 
up-hill. 

As to my righteous indignation, it may seem 
to you a poor thing, but it never came back. 
Somehow I never quite forgot the grip of 
Mamie's hand on mine that day, and her 
hoarse voice as it announced the total ruin of 
her hopes; or the memory, by contrast, of her 
little singing dance before Anne at a happier 
season, with Anne leaning forward holding de- 
lightedly to the sides of the tub. 

He is not apt to be the most severe in cor- 
rection who has suffered much discipline at 
the hands of Fate. It should be remembered 
by the unrelenting and conscientious discipli- 
narian who judges me, that I had seen the 
ruin of some of my own hopes. Joys that I had 
63 



Adventures in Indigence 

planned for full as eagerly as Mamie, delights 
that I had reared on more likely foundations, 
had been swept away, and almost as suddenly. 
I am entering here on no philosophy, I am 
merely stating facts ; and I may as well confess 
that I took comfort in the thought, that, 
though the bureau, the washstand and the 
"chiffoneer" had fallen in the general ruin, 
Mamie still had the sheets, the pillow-cases, 
the towels, the muffin-rings, and the rest. It 
was even turning out a little like a fairy-tale 
after all, for I really now wanted her to have 
these, and in view of my own very meagre cir- 
cumstances and my duties to others, I could 
not with a clear conscience have afforded to 
give them to her. She, as with a magic fore- 
sight, had contrived to relieve me of all em- 
barrassment. 

Meanwhile, I heard nothing more of Mamie. 
Then one day, I had this letter from her (I 
omit the independent spelling) : — 

"I thought I'd write to tell you that Anne 
has a good Papa. He's a farmer. I'm mar- 
ried again." (Since she was not married be- 
fore, the "again" may refer to a second wed- 
ding ring.) "He's got a nice house. Do come 
64 



The Lure of the Chiffoneer 

and see me." (Here followed very careful di- 
rections.) "I'd like you to see our animals. 
We've got five chickens, one rooster, a cat and 
a dog. He had a house already furnished. It's 
good furnished too. The bed has got shams on 
the pillows." 

It was not long after this that I had a letter 
from an old aunt of Mamie's, of whom Mamie 
had several times spoken to me, and to whom 
she used sometimes to write. The aunt said 
that, though she had always been too poor to 
do anything for Mamie, still she took an in- 
terest in her. She knew I had been good to 
her. If it was n 't too much trouble, would I 
write and tell her how Mamie was, or would I 
send her her address if she was not with me. 

I wrote her with a good deal of pleasure that 
Mamie was happily married (I did not quib- 
ble at the word) to a well-to-do farmer; that 
she had a nicely furnished house, some ani- 
mals, and that her husband loved Anne de- 
votedly ; and I gave the desired address. 

Then I wrote to Mamie and sent her her 
aunt's letter; and I told her that I thought it 
would be a kindness if she would write to the 
old lady. 

6 65 



Adventures in Indigence 

In reply I had the following: "I know you 
meant to be kind. But I'm sorry you wrote 
to my aunt. It wasn't my aunt at all. It 
was Bill." 

Here also — I know it well — fact is less 
satisfactory than romance. There should, no 
doubt, be the telling scene of a sequel. I never 
saw Mamie again, however, and the unfo- 
cused waving of a fat, lovely little hand in 
that crowded terminal is my last memory of 
Anne. 

You who read this may be in some uneasi- 
ness as to Mamie. I confess that I am not. I 
cannot forget the angels of grace that do un- 
doubtedly attend on such. If you will simply 
review what I have told you, I think you will 
see that we need not be too anxious. One who 
can set aside social customs and laws which 
the less privileged of us do not dare to ignore; 
who can be married without clerk or benefit 
of clergy — rather, after the manner of the 
owl and the pussy-cat, by the mere procur- 
ing of a ring ; who can protect her child from 
drowning by a canton-flannel charm; im- 
prove health and digestion by a diet of burned 
bread-crusts; rise above all fact and experi- 
66 



The Lure of the Chiffoneer 

ence as successfully as if she were a witch on a 
broomstick; and preserve her faith unspoiled, 
despite the most blasting circumstances; who 
hob-nobs on such easy terms with the Deity, 
and who can speak of her whom the poets 
prefer to name "Star of the Deep," and the 
devout, "Queen of Heaven," as the Deity's 
"Maw-ma"; one who can, like a prestidigita- 
teur, by a mere turn of the hand, make your 
conscientious resolves vanish — and draw pity 
out of the place where solemn indignation 
should have been, as magicians rabbits out of 
a silk hat ; who can carry off your much needed 
linen, and have it look like a favor — Need 
we worry about such a one? Need Pharaoh, 
having seen the wonders, be anxious, do you 
think, as to how the departed children of Is- 
rael would be maintained in the desert places 
where he would so easily have perished? 

But lest you should, nevertheless, have 
Mamie's welfare at heart, and should enter- 
tain, with some misgivings, thought of what 
may have become of Anne, there are yet other 
signs and wonders of which I shall ask to be 
allowed to speak. 

67 



VI 
MARGARET 

Margaret, Mamie's successor, was a wo- 
man in the middle forties. There were Httle 
shadowy modeHngs in her brow which made 
you think of the smooth hollows of a shell. 
She gave one the impression of something cast 
up from the sea and dragged back into it 
many times. She came of a large family, and 
although her people had treated her badly 
(according to her own story), she took pride 
nevertheless in speaking of them. " Me brother 
Pat," I may say, was never spoken of without 
her head going up. She had a taste for dis- 
tinction, and pride of race was strong in her. 
She was a born teller of tales. One of the best 
was of a wake to which she was taken as a child. 

" It was a grrrand wake! The folk from all 
arrOond were there ! And they 'd baked meats 
such as you 'd have only in the rrrichest houses 
here. I was eight year old. I went with me 
brother Pat. The dead man had been a mean 
old man, savin' and hoardin', not spendin', 
even for the poor. They do say the dead '11 
come back if ye worry them enough; and it's 
68 



Margaret 

likely it worried him something terrible to see 
all that spendin' of his money, and all the 
neighbor folk he hated so, crowded so close in 
his room and the dhrrrink goin' round. Any- 
way, however be it, as I was lookin' at him 
from my corner, all eyes, for I 'd never seen 
a dead man before, God save us! up he rose 
from the dead, right among all the candles, 
upsettin' some of them; and he screamed, 
yes, screamed, too, like he'd just escaped from 
hell, with the devil's fingers still hot on him! 
Some went by the windys, some by the door. 
Five got broken legs gettin' out, and the priest, 
God save us! fell down dead, and him a good 
man, too!" 

This was but a small piece of ore from a rich 
mine. Give her but the chance — she had a 
story for every occasion. 

She went on a tour of inspection when she 
had been with us a few hours. I felt sure that 
the beauty and meaning of the old run-down 
place, of necessity hid from the profane, 
would never be lost on one of her keen and 
psychic temperament. She came back glow- 
ing, and I thought really reverent. 

"Oh, it's a noble place," she said. "You 

^9 



Adventures in Indigence 

can see plainer nor your eyes, it's been lived 
in by the gentility! Look at them gables and 
them chimneys! That house has the air of a 
grand lady, ma'am, sittin' quiet with her 
hands folded. And them elms, too, like the 
grand slow wavin' of a fan. Them parlors 
with their long windys have got the air of 
havin' seen folk. Me brother Pat worked for a 
place like this once." This with her head up 
and looking all round. "There's a rich squire 
lived here at the least," — with her eyes nar- 
rowed shrewdly and her head nodding, I can 
give you no idea how knowingly. "Yes; and 
belike maybe a lord. And there were ladies 
(seems I can see them, God save me!) and 
little childer, I'll give warrant, little childer 
that knew how to behave themselves in the 
like of these rooms. Don't it look dreamin' 
now, ma'am? Would n't you say it was 
thinkin'?" This with her head on one side, 
listening, it seemed, for the unseen presences 
to go by. By and by she brightened, and came 
back to the present : — 

"There's but one thing about it all I don't 
like, ma'am. It's the way ye keep your pig. 
A sty way off from Christian fellowship is no 
70 



Margaret 

place to keep a pig. They're the childer of 
God, the way we are. We kept our own, 
ma'am, in the old country as clean as your 
hand, so we could have it friendly in the 
kitchen with us. I 'm fond of animals, ma'am 
— the puir things that can't talk!" 

Besides her great fondness for animals Mar- 
garet had an extraordinary understanding of 
them. She had a way of talking with bird and 
beast that lent reality to the legends of St. 
Francis. The "Sermon to the Birds" is no 
more intimate, nor that to the fishes more 
appropriate, than the daily admonitions she 
gave the pig, the counsel she tendered the 
chickens, to which they listened with grave 
attention, the pig as if hypnotized, his two fore 
feet planted stolidly, his eyes fixed upon her; 
the chickens with their heads turned con- 
sideringly, now on this side now on the other, 
and with little guttural comments of question 
or approval. The wolf reputed to have put 
his paw in the saint's hand seemed infinitely 
less legendary to me after I had seen the pig, 
released from his pen, follow her to the kitchen 
stoop, and, with manners as gentlemanly as 
he could counterfeit, eat out of a pan she held 
71 



Adventures in Indigence 

for him. When he had finished, she offered 
him her hand, as if to pledge him to further 
good manners; and he made a clumsy pawing 
motion and managed with her help to get a 
hoof into her palm. She gave it a grave shake 
and released it. 

"You're improvin'," was all she said; while 
the pig, delighted, no doubt, with his new ac- 
complishment, took to his four feet, with 
squeals of delight, around the corner of the 
house. 

One day there came from about her person 
a strange chirping, a trifle muffled, like the 
chirping of a tiny chicken. She absolutely 
ignored it. She held her head stiff and high, 
as she was wont to do when she served us or 
when she referred to "me brother Pat." But 
when she saw that the day could not after all 
be carried by a mere haughty ignoring of facts, 
she spoke. 

"Poor little uneducated abandoned fowl, 
ma'am, to cry out against its own interests! 
I 'm sorry, but I could n't leave it in the cold. 
So, for the love of its mother and God's mother, 
I 'm carry in' it in me bosom to keep it warm. 
And I 'd think you 'd be offended if I did n't 
72 



Margaret 

believe you're a follower of Him that carried 
the lambs there too!" 

It was in such ways that she left you no ar- 
gument, disarmed all objection, and pursued 
her own way and predilections, as the saints, 
the poor, and other chosen of the Lord have, 
I believe, always done. 

Loyalty was, perhaps, the largest part of 
her code; but it was based rather on the as- 
sumption that you were hers than that she 
was yours. Guests came seldom to that 
old house; but the welcome she gave them 
when they did come was a thing to warm the 
heart. 

She assumed a devoted possession of me and 
my affairs. When these fared ill, she was as 
Babylon desolated ; when they went compara- 
tively well, she was overjoyed, her step light- 
ened, her head went up; she was as a city set 
upon a hill, that cannot be hid. But it was 
toward those whom she took to be my enemies 
that she really shone. By shrewd guesses and 
by dint of a few downright questions, she fig- 
ured out that a deal of sorrow and calamity had 
come to me through the selfishness of others. 
That was enough for her! Might the Lord 

73 



Adventures in Indigence 

smite them ! Might a murrain seize them and 
their cattle ! 

"But they have no cattle, Margaret! They 
live in a very large city." 

(It was always a temptation to see how she 
would right herself.) 

"Then may devastation befittin' them fall 
on their basements and their battlements! 
May their balustrades burst and a sign of pes- 
tilence be put upon their door-sills ! And — 
now God forgive me — whenever He's willin' 
to take them — for it 's He would know what 
to do with them," — this with a fierce know- 
ing nod, — " He has my willin'ness they should 
go! I'd think it a fairer earth without them, 
and I'd greet the sun the friendlier in the 
morn'n' for knowin' he'd not set his bright 
eye on them." 

Many batter-cakes were stirred to rounded 
periods of this sort, and omelettes beaten the 
stiffer for her indignation. 

Once it came to her in a roundabout way 
that illness had fallen upon one of these whom 
for my sake she despised. She looked shrewdly 
at something at a very long distance, invisible 
to any but herself, winked one eye very delib- 

74 



Margaret 

erately, with incredible calculation; then nod- 
ded her head slowly, like a witch or sibyl. 

*'What did I tell ye! The currrse is begin- 
nin' to work!" 

Funny as it was, there was something awful 
in it too. 

"But, Margaret, I don't wish them any ill. 
I don't believe people make others suffer like 
that if they are in their right minds. Perhaps 
they think they are doing right." 

"Of courrrse they do! If they ever could 
think they were wrong, there 'd be salvation 
for them! But you see how clear it is that 
they 're doomed to destruction!" 

"It's slow waitin' on the Lord," she said 
one day wearily. "And oh, it's meself would 
like to stir them up a little cake befittin' them ! " 

I know she thought me a weakling as to hate. 
But for the insuperable difficulty of several 
centuries, I believe she would have left me, to 
ally herself with the Borgias. 

When she had been with me some time, she 
had a serious illness. She had been subject to 
periodical attacks of the kind, it seems, since 
her girlhood. 

"I didn't tell you," she said simply, "for 
75 



Adventures in Indigence 

if I had, ye would n't have engaged me; and 
I Hked the looks of ye." Then, triumphantly, 
"Nor was I mistaken." 

This was the beginning of a system of ap- 
peals, searching and frequent, which yet never 
took the direct form of appeal. 

"It's I can't be sayin' how I love this old 
house," she would say irrelevantly one day; 
and the next, "Me brother Pat has been very 
kind to me at times — at times!'' — here a 
slow wink and nod at the invisible, — "but it 's 
not your own, God save me, that'll do for you 
in misfortune ! No, ma'am, it 's not your own ! ' ' 

She began giving me little presents, a lace 
collar first. I insisted that I would rather she 
kept it herself. 

* ' God save us ! And all you ' ve done for me ! ' ' 
Her tone was almost despair. "And you would 
n't let me do that for you! A bit of a lace 
collar!" 

The next time it was a strange mosaic cross ; 
and the next, a queerly contrived egg-beater; 
again, a very fine and beautiful handkerchief 
— all of these produced from her trunk. She 
always had some ingenious tale of how she 
had come by them. 

76 



Margaret 

Meanwhile her attacks were becoming more 
frequent. At such times she was Hke one pos- 
sessed by some spirit. Her mind would wander 
suddenly, always to her childhood and the 
Green Isle. She would be calling the cows home 
at evening, or talking to the pig. When the 
"spirit" left her, she would be trembling and 
almost helpless for days, and needed much 
care. 

When she was well enough for me to leave 
her, I went to see her doctor and her people. 
The first suggested the almshouse : the others 
thought that they were not called on to keep 
her unless she would agree to do exactly as 
they bade her do, and would renounce her 
proud ways. 

Of course I kept her with me. There are ex- 
travagances of poverty which may be allowed, 
as well as of wealth. Something, too, must be 
conceded to the spirit of adventure and reck- 
lessness. It may be at this crossroads that the 
provident will bid me adieu. I am sorry to 
lose their company, for, despite their lesser 
distinction and certain plebeian tendencies, I 
like the provident. But before they determine 
to depart, I may be allowed to wonder whether 
77 



Adventures in Indigence 

they have ever been in such close relation with 
the poor as I was then. Have they ever felt 
the persistent appeal of a Margaret, I wonder, 
or seen her eyes go twenty times a day to them 
as to one who held her fate in their keeping? 
I think perhaps they will not have overheard 
her say to the pig in a moment of half-gay 
thankfulness, "Arrah! God save us! are ye 
glad as ye should be ye 're with people that 
have got a heart?" Or perhaps the provident 
will scarcely have been vouchsafed a terrible 
understanding, as I had at that time, of the 
dark possibilities of life, or have known what 
it was to wonder where the next meals would 
come from. 

"But," argue the provident, "could she 
not have gone to her people?" Which, being 
interpreted, means: "Should she not have 
taken thankfully the grudged and conditioned 
charity, with dominion, offered her by those 
in more fortunate circumstances?" 

And to that I answer, " If you think so, then 
I can only judge that you know little 'how 
salt is the bread of others and how steep their 
stairs'; and I can but refer you to one who 
has spoken immortally of these matters." 
78 



Margaret 

One day, when she had been ill for more 
than a week, I told her that she might stay on 
with me and be cared for, and have a certain 
very moderate wage, and do only such little 
light work as she felt able to, all the heavier 
being taken over by a stronger woman. 

She pricked her head up and spoke from a 
white pillow, equal to fate once more : — 

" Now, God save us! If it is n't always good 
that be growin' out of evil! I '11 be yer house- 
keeper! And who'll ye have for a cook? 'T is 
I '11 be keepin' the keys of things ! Bring along 
the cook! Black or white, I don't care. / kin 
manage her ! " (This threateningly.) 

This was alarming, but I counted upon in- 
spiration and ingenuity when the time came. 

I found a West India darky, whose condition 
also needed improving. She was a fine type. 
She might have walked out of the jungles of 
Africa; magnificently powerful, a little old. 
She was as irrevocably Protestant as Margaret 
was Catholic. I urged each of them privately 
to remember that they were both the Lord's 
children and therefore sisters. Augusta ac- 
cepted this in solemn religious spirit, — such a 
speech on my part bound her to me forever, — 

79 



Adventures in Indigence 

but Margaret took it with a chip on her 
shoulder. 

"She can call herself a Christian if she likes, 
but it is an insult to the Lord, for she's nothin' 
better nor a heathen! Black like that!" 

"But, Margaret, you said you would not 
object to a black woman." 

"No, ma'am, nor I don't!" said Margaret, 
veering swiftly after her own manner ; " it 's her 
pink lips I can't shtand." 

This was the beginning of their warfare; 
which, not inconsistently, was made infinitely 
more bitter by Augusta's fixed resolve to be 
a Christian. 

Augusta had a predilection for hymns, one 
in particular, whose refrain could be heard 
wailing and poignant and confident at odd 
moments : — 

Oh, what a Father, oh, what a Friend! 

He will be with you unto the end. 
Oh, what a Father, oh, what a Friend! 

He will be with you unto the end. 

Margaret, like most of those of her creed, 

had a small opinion of hymn-singing, and 

haughtily indulged in none of it. Moreover, 

she had in very strong essence that secure 

80 



Margaret 

sense of election and special grace common 
with some of her faith. Let others attend 
mere temples and mitigated meeting-houses, 
and presume to call them churches if they 
like; let others take dark risks of undoctrinal 
salvation! Such spiritual vagabondage must 
by contrast give but the greater assurance of 
security to those elected since the beginning — 
a peculiar and a chosen people. It can be seen, 
therefore, how Augusta's confident appropria- 
tion of the Deity, with her reiterated boast of 
friendly intimacy, wore upon this daughter 
of antique distinctions and ancient privileges. 

There was, of course, soon established a 
strongly vicious circle; for, when Margaret be- 
came excessively trying and difficult to deal 
with, Augusta would console and fortify her- 
self with the reassurances of this particular 
refrain; whereas, at the same time, this par- 
ticular refrain having the effect of rousing 
Margaret to still worse and worse moods, 
these, in turn, made the consolations of the 
refrain even more than ever indispensable to 
Augusta. 

I do not know, I am sure, what would have 
been the final result of it all save for the pig. 
7 8i 



Adventures in Indigence 

When Margaret's limit of endurance was 
reached, she would come out of the house, 
sometimes with her hands over her ears, and 
make off at a kind of trot in the direction of the 
pig's habitat. There, I am inclined to believe, 
she was able, after her own manner, to find 
consolation and assuagement in her unrivaled 
place in his affections, as well as in the friendly, 
grave, and undivided attention which he always 
gave her. 

Impossible as Margaret was, I could see that 
her appealing and lovable qualities played on 
Augusta as they had long played on me. 

"The poor afflicted soul!" said Augusta; 
"look at the poor thin temples. You don't 
know, ma 'am, how I pray for her every night ! " 

Margaret, passing by unexpectedly, over- 
heard this and cried out, — 

"Oh, God save us! Then I am lost! The 
Lord will abandon me now for sure! He'll 
never forgive me such company! That's the 
wurst yet!" 

Then she went off for another of her long 
conversations with the pig. When she came 
back she was in a changed mood. 

"Don't mind what I say," she said to me. 
82 



Margaret 

"If God can forgive me, I don't know I'm 
sure, why you can't!" Then she put a rosy- 
cheeked apple beside Augusta. "And I think 
you'll find this pleasant to the taste." 

Remembering the Borgias, I should have 
been loath to taste it; but Augusta bit into 
it with immediate Christian forgiveness. Yet 
late that afternoon the wind had shifted again 
into the old quarter. Happening to go into the 
woodshed, I found Augusta there crying. 

' ' What in the world is the matter, Augusta ? ' ' 
I asked. 

"I'm crying," she said, anticipating Shaw 
and Androcles, "because I'm a Christian and 
I can't strike her!" 

She raised her old bloodshot eyes, not to me, 
but to heaven. I have seen the same look in 
the eyes of an old dog teased by a pert mon- 
grel, and crippled and rendered helpless by 
rheumatism as was Augusta by her Chris- 
tianity. 

It was Margaret herself at last, who an- 
nounced that she would be obliged to leave 
me. She spoke with a dignity which she had 
held over, I suppose, from regal years sub- 
merged but not forgotten. 
83 



Adventures in Indigence 

" It 's I will have to be goin' ; I Ve stayed as 
long as I can. I've stood a great deal, — for 
ye '11 stand a terrible lot for them ye 're fond 
of, — and I 've been terrible fond of you, more 
than of me own — and am to this day. But 
I can't honest say it's of your deserving! 
There's a sayin' that we love best them 
that mistreat us most, and I 'm for thinkin' it 
may be true. I 'd have stayed to help you, 
but I must be havin' some thought of meself! 
Though you 've treated me as I would n't treat 
me own," — this teUingly, — "and asked me 
to live under the roof with one of them the 
Lord has abandoned, yet I 've a kindly feelin' 
in me heart still for ye, and if ye were in need 
and ye 'd come to me, maybe I would n't say 
ye nay — I don't know. I 'm a forgivin' dis- 
position, more than is for me own good, God 
knows! I've hated yer enemies and doomed 
them to desthruction ! " 

I patted her hand good-bye between two per- 
fectly well-balanced desires to laugh and to 
cry. She was so funny, so incredible, so bent, 
since the foundation of the world, on proving 
herself right and everybody else wrong. She 
was not Margaret, merely, whom chance and 
84 



Margaret 

trouble had brought into my path — she was 
a very piece of humanity, decked out in unac- 
customed bonnet and unUkely feather, best 
petticoat and a grand pair of black kid gloves 
— humanity, the ancient, the amusing, the 
faulty, the incredible, the pathetic, the en- 
deared. And it was as that that she rode away 
in the funny old jolting farm wagon, her chin 
in the air, her eyes glancing around haughtily, 
scanning the old place she had loved and clung 
to, but scanning it scornfully now, as if she 
had never laid eyes on it before, and were 
saying, "Ye puir thing! — with yer air of de- 
lapidation! Who — God save us — are you? " 

I went back into the kitchen and caught 
Augusta wiping her eyes with her apron, and 
was not altogether gay myself — while Mar- 
garet jolted away fiercely, our two scalps at 
her belt. 

"You must n't worry too much about her, 
ma'am," said Augusta soothingly ; "the Lord is 
her friend, and He'll take care of her." 

From incontrovertible precedent I felt sure 
that He would, with a sureness I had never 
had as to my own less considerable destiny. 

All this was some years ago. By a curious 

85 



Adventures in Indigence 

chance, — which has the air of being some- 
thing more considerable, — it was while I was 
writing these very paragraphs about Marga- 
ret that I had a letter from her, the first since 
she rode away. It was very characteristic, 
written in a scrawly and benevolent hand : — 

"Will you please let me hear, ma'am, whe- 
ther you 're dead or alive. I 've had you on my 
mind, and for six weeks I can't sleep night or 
day for thinking of you. 

"Your old servant, 

"Margaret." 

Let no one tell me that this is mere coinci- 
dence. New proof it is, to one who has long 
dealt with the poor, of strange powers of 
which they are possessed. Here is a sister, I 
tell you, — "plainer nor your eyes," — to the 
old blind man, who used to come tap-tap, tap- 
tapping up the shadowy stairs and into the 
nursery for the penny I had withheld. 

Margaret had come back also. Useless to 
suppose that I could hide from her in the 
silence and shadows of the intervening years. 
She had with her shrewd eye found me out. 
She had come, like the blind man, not to exact 
86 



Margharetta 

money of me, no ; but like a witch disembodied, 
and through the mail, she had come to levy a 
more precious tax — to collect as of old the 
old sympathetic affection; the old toll I had 
paid her so often before; the tribute she had 
demanded and received times without num- 
ber — not for labors rendered, no, nor for 
accountable values received, but rather by a 
kind of royal prerogative. Indeed, I take it to 
be a thing proved, to which this is but slight 
additional testimony, that these are, how 
much more than kings, — and it would seem 
by the grace of God, — sovereigns and rulers 
over us. 

But there is still further testimony, of an- 
other order, which I feel called on to bear. 

VII 
MARGHARETTA 

When we first went to live in the country, 
in the old house of which I have written, we 
had a sufficiently large task merely to make 
the house itself livable. But as time went on, 
we attempted to do a very little farming. 

How greatly did this broaden and extend 
87 



Adventures in Indigence 

my experience as to the poor ! There were the 
boys from ten to sixteen who came (again, 
these were those whose condition needed im- 
proving) to do work on the farm for the sum- 
mers: Joseph, the Hebrew, who from his long 
and elaborate prayers should have been at 
least a priest of the Temple; Lester, so prac- 
tised in picking locks and purloining that it 
was sheer waste of genius to place him in a 
home like ours, where jewelry and other re- 
turns for his skill were so slender. He did the 
best he could with the circumstances, but how 
meagre they were, after all ! 

There was the little girl, too, who could 
dance and recite and sing ragtime, having done 
so in vaudeville. Our home offered her neither 
audience nor stage, nor was there a footlight 
in the house. And there was the young Apollo, 
who at the least could have shepherded the 
sheep of Admetus ; we had no sheep — only 
one cow. 

Then there was Ernest, capable of really 
heroic devotion. How far did our possibilities 
fall short of his gifts ! I did not engage him — 
he engaged me. I was setting out the disadvan- 
tages as usual, when he blurted out gener- 
88 



Margharetta 

ously, " I like you, and I am going to take this 
position!" He was blond, German, of the per- 
fectly good-natured type, and of heroic pro- 
portions. But, like the ancient heroes of his 
race, he was fond of the cup that both cheers 
and inebriates. I used to remonstrate with 
him and received always one answer, given 
stubbornly: "You know I'd jump in the river 
for you!" 

I tried my best to show him that what was 
desirable was, not that he should fling himself 
into the river, only that he should refrain from 
the cup! Useless, useless! He wanted a more 
royal opportunity. To be sober, trustworthy, 
honorable, daily dependable — these were too 
trifling! Give him something worthy of his 
powers! The unlikely and surprising were 
pleasing to his temperament. He would how 
generously neglect his work to bring home 
from the field rabbits, which he shot with an 
old muzzle-loader, requiring days of toil be- 
fore it could be got to work at all. Once he 
produced a pheasant. Lacking the Nemean 
lion, he butchered a pig, and smoked the pork 
for me, by an incredibly laborious method, 
under two barrels, one on top of the other. 
89 



Adventures in Indigence 

He hewed down trees with terrible strokes, 
and built me with Herculean effort a corn-crib 
of gigantic size to hold a handful of corn he 
had raised. 

All these things, while I appreciated them, 
left his grave fault uncorrected. But to re- 
buke him on this score was to quarrel with 
Hercules for some trifling mistake in his spin- 
ning. "You know I would jump in the river 
for you!" he would reiterate. 

There really is something ample in their 
conceptions of life which goes beyond our small 
bickerings as to honor and honesty. There is 
a largeness about them which makes our code 
look small indeed. 

After Ernest's departure, another came for 
a few months, who had surprising resources. 
He made a practice of bringing me gifts from 
I do not know where — strawberries, aspara- 
gus, and other delicacies, given him presum- 
ably, and for the most part, by gardeners of 
gentlemen's estates in the outlying land — 
"friends of his." 

I suggested, with misgivings as to ethics, 
that I ought to pay for these things; but he 
smiled benevolently, as a king on a subject, 
90 



Margharetta 

and with a manner as bounteous. I had the 
impression that the world was his. 

In the face of his generosities, I felt my be- 
haviors to be feeble and inadequate. These 
were bounties of a kind to which I was unac- 
customed and parvenu, I who had none of the 
ancient quarterings which would have en- 
titled me to such gratuities; I who had been 
brought up to the deplorably plebeian idea 
that one must pay for what one takes. 

These are occasions, when, frankly, I am at 
a loss how to deport myself. I do not know 
the behaviors befitting. My etiquette does 
not go so far; and Chesterfield, who covers so 
many points, stops short of this: he says noth- 
ing on the subject. 

Oh, royal ways! Oh, fine prerogatives! 
What hope have I, who am but descended from 
the founders of a mere country, from men who 
fought and poured out their blood rather than 
pay for what they did not receive — what 
hope is there that I shall ever attain to .that 
gracious and lordly company which receives, 
as a right, that for which it does not pay! 

I have named but a few of these princely 
chiameters and their deportments ; but remem- 

91 



Adventures in Indigence 

bering them all and weighing all their values, 
I believe that "the brightest jewel in my crown 
wad" still be — Margharetta. 

I have never been entirely certain that 
Margharetta was not descended from the 
Bourbons. Her husband was in jail for theft, 
and was a poet. " I will show you some of hie 
poetry," she promised me in the first five 
minutes of my acquaintance with her. "Some 
of my friends say he is as great a poet as 
Shakespeare." 

Like Marie Antoinette, she had three chil- 
dren. Her husband's misfortune had made it 
necessary to put these under the care of others. 
She talked of them incessantly, and assured me 
that no heart could bleed like a mother's. 

As we drove up from the station, she looked 
all about her, with the air of a Siddons. 

"Wouldn't Ethel enjoy this scenery!" 
she remarked, still very grand, but almost 
awed, it seemed. "She 's such a poetic child ! " 
(Ethel was the oldest, a little girl of ten.) 
''And these trees!" she said solemnly, as we 
entered the grave lordly shadows of the hem- 
locks. "Would n't Richard enjoy them, now!" 
(Richard was the Dauphin, aged six.) 
92 



Margharetta 

When we at last got to the house, and she 
entered the kitchen in her grand manner, it 
seemed to grow large — as the lintels and 
chambers of the Greeks are said to have done 
when the gods visited them. The walls seemed 
to widen out, and the pans and kettles took on 
a shining stateliness. I have difficulty when 
writing of her to keep myself to fact, so gra- 
cious, so spacious, was her manner. I know, for 
instance, that her dresses all dipped a little at 
the back, yet I have the greatest temptation 
to say she wore a court train, so much was 
that the enlarging impression that she at all 
times conveyed. She was the most dominating 
personality, I believe, that I have ever known. 
Like a French verb, she seemed to cover and 
account for all possibilities. She reminded you 
of the infinitive, the subjunctive, the future, 
the indicative, the plus-giie-parfait. Entering 
the dining-room, her handsome hands bearing 
— always a little aloft — the corned beef or 
pot roast that should have been a peacock 
at the very least, she conveyed, silently, time 
and tense and person, passive and active: "I 
am"; "let us love"; "let us have"; "thou 
hast"; "I have nor \ "if I had!" 
93 



Adventures in Indigence 

Early in her career, I asked her what des- 
serts she could make. 

She turned her full Bourbon eyes on me. 
She had no need to lift her head: it was con- 
stitutionally, structurally high. 

" I can't make any," she said, with firmness 
and finality. "We bought all our desserts at 
the delicatessen." 

So, without anger, only with dignity, she 
managed to put me in my place. 

Added to the many unconscious appeals 
that Margharetta was forever making to me, 
she finally made a direct one. Informing me 
once more that no heart could bleed like a 
mother's, she begged to be allowed to have, if 
it were only one of her children with her, the 
little girl aged ten. I consented, and went my- 
self to fetch her. 

She was a beautiful child. She had a great 
deal of Margharetta's own handsome, insolent 
beauty, but she had in addition a craft and 
ability for lying and deception astounding in 
one so young. Ten years old by the calendar 
she no doubt was; but by sundry other reck- 
onings, she might have been ten thousand — 
a strange, pathetic, puzzling little girl. 
94 



Margharetta 

For a time Margharetta's heart was staunch- 
ed. But ere long it began to bleed afresh for 
the one who was, it was now clear, her dear- 
est — Richard, the little Dauphin. She would 
stand looking out of the window, the picture 
of wretchedness. "He is such an angelic little 
fellow! I can't begin to tell you ! Oh, if I could 
only see him! If I could only have him in my 
arms once more!" 

I make no apology. I only tell the event, 
perhaps a little shamefacedly. It was not long 
after this that I went and fetched Richard also. 

If his sister was ten thousand, Richard was, 
I think, of prehistoric origin. He had carried 
over from the Stone Age a strange ability for 
having his own way at heavy cost. He had 
never been in the country. His passion for 
flowers would have been a hopeful and poetic 
thing, had it but been accompanied by a 
knowledge of what flowers were. He would ap- 
pear in full rapture, bearing a huge bouquet 
of young bean-plants or a large nosegay of 
freshly planted cabbages. Never, despite my 
faithful efforts, did he lose his passionate love 
of flowers, and never, despite my equally faith- 
ful endeavors, did he learn to know what 
95 



Adventures in Indigence 

flowers were. I think that they were to him 
anything that could be gathered with greatest 
ease in largest bunches. With this definition 
in mind, it will be seen that a vegetable gar- 
den offers superlative opportunities. 

Margharetta could see in all this nothing 
but a newly interesting phase of her darling. 
I was there when he brought her his third gen- 
erous bouquet. She took it into her gracious 
handsome hands, held it off a little, then ap- 
pealed to me for appreciation : — 

"Now, isn't that his mother's boy? He 
brings everything to me.'" 

I had explained to Margharetta before, that, 
right as filial affection undoubtedly is, the 
gathering of young tomato-plants from the 
garden had come to be fearfully wrong. I now 
repeated this severely, then addressed the 
Dauphin direct. 

"You are never, never to gather anything 
from the garden again; do you understand?" 

Back went the Dauphin's head suddenly; 
his face became a purple mask of tragedy; his 
eyes rained intolerable tears; he broke forth 
into a most wild and tragic wail. 

Margharetta stooped, gathered him to her 
96 



Margharetta 

bosom with one of her finest gestures, lifted 
him sobbing in her arms, laid his head against 
her shoulder, held it there with a possessive 
queenly hand, and with a colder look thrown 
at me, I am sure, than ever the Bourbons threw 
at the mob, carried him upstairs. 

Later she explained to me haughtily what 
the Dauphin had meanwhile explained to her 
— he had been told to gather those plants. 

" Told to gather them? " 

"Yes. Come, lamb, tell just what Tony 
said to you." 

"Tony said," began Richard, a little breath- 
less, but resolved, and twisting and braiding 
his fingers as he spoke, "Tony said, 'You can 
have all the flowers you want, every day, and 
I think your mother would like the tomato- 
plants best.'" 

This sudden opera-bouffe turn of affairs 
really took me off my feet. When I suggested 
that it was quite certain that Tony would 
contradict Richard's statement, Margharet- 
ta's reply was perfectly consistent. Did I sup- 
pose she would take the word of "a no-ac- 
count Eye-talian " against that of her darling? ' 

So I found myself once more face to face 
8 97 



Adventures in Indigence 

with that total disregard of fact and proba- 
biUties which I had now come to know as one 
of the leading characteristics of her class. It 
was for me to remember that miracle waits 
upon them; that nothing is improbable to 
them if it but coincide with their desires; 
that truth shall not serve them unless it goes 
dressed in their livery. Nothing could be done 
about the matter. We were at a deadlock. 
What were mere logic and reason? What are 
they ever, in the face of a faith chosen and ad- 
hered to? 

Margharetta stood firm in an unshaken faith 
in her own, while I departed, to wonder why 
it is that humanity deports itself as decently 
as it does, with these dark powers, not only 
at work in it, but hugely at work in it, all the 
while. 

The days went on. In the course of becom- 
ing acquainted with the country, the little 
Princess and the Dauphin underwent, of 
course, many tragic adventures. Though they 
had me so well in command that I ran to do 
their bidding, or flew to their rescue, at a mere 
summoning shriek, wind, water, fire, cats, 
dogs, cows, horses, poison ivy, snapping tur- 
98 



Margharetta 

ties, and sundry other folk were not so bid- 
dable. 

This recalcitrancy led to tragedies innum- 
erable. When either or both children were 
hurt by some fact or reality which by mere 
royal habit they had haughtily ignored, and 
when they were beaten in the fray and wound- 
ed, Margharetta was as one bereft of her 
senses. Panic seized her. She flung herself 
upon my^ mercy and my intelligence. She 
wrung her hands. She was distraught. She 
could do nothing herself for her darlings, but 
was wild with gratitude, and watched with 
tragic animal eyes everything that I was able 
to do for them. How wonderful I was at such 
moments! How could she ever thank me! 
Then from my ministrations she would receive 
into her arms the battered Princess or dilapi- 
dated Dauphin, as it might have been from 
the hands of a relented Providence. 

My own glory lasted only during the danger, 
however. Her darlings secure, she was not 
long in reascending her throne, and continued to 
behave with entire consistency as to her prob- 
able ancestry. She was the only real queen, 
with all a queen's regality and insolence, 
99 



Adventures in Indigence 

that I have ever dealt with. It is clear to me 
now that I was hypnotized by her manner 
to think it a privilege to be of use to her in 
the calamities of herself and her family. It 
is true I did at last make a fearful revolu- 
tionary stand for liberty, and bundled her and 
the young Princess of ten and ten thousand 
and the little prehistoric Dauphin off one day, 
and began as best I could to reconstruct life; 
but not before I had come fearfully near, in 
the Versailles manner in which Margharetta 
had conducted herself and our kitchen, being 
a "condition" myself. 

It is now five years ago, "of a sunny morn- 
ing," since they left us, and the post brought 
me the other day a short letter from Margha- 
retta enclosing a "poem" by her husband, on 
the death of the little girl. She "wanted me to 
know." I feel quite sure that the letter was 
divided between sorrow for her loss and pride 
in her husband's performance. 

The circumstance touched me more than I 
would have supposed possible. I thought of 
course of a mother's "bleeding heart." Poor 
Margharetta, for all her queenliness and all 
her disregard of fact, brought at last with the 

100 



The Powers of the Poor 

humblest of us to face the one supreme reaUty ; 
and weaving as best she could some fancy 
about that, too, and turning away her face 
from it toward some consolation of reunion 
which (the verses promised this) was to be 
given her in another life, and, I doubt not, 
also toward the pride in this life of being 
wedded to a man (let us waive the matter 
of the jail) who could write poetry, and 
was, some thought, "as great as Shake- 
speare." 

VIII 

THE POWERS OF THE POOR 

That the poor have strange, one might al- 
most say occult, powers, seems to me proved. 
The downtrodden with whom I dealt were, so 
far as I could judge, the very pies and daws of 
existence, who, one might reasonably suppose, 
would be grateful for whatever hips and haws 
and other chance berries the bleak winter of 
their calamities left them. Nothing could be 
further from the truth. They lived, rather, it 
would seem, on canary seed and millet, maize 
and sesame, not obtainable in the open mar- 

lOI 



Adventures in Indigence 

kets of the world. I fell under the strange de- 
lusion that they were to labor for me, and that, 
for a wage agreed upon, they were to relieve 
me of care. Again, how wide of the mark was 
this ! They expected to be looked after like 
queen bees, and they were! I myself laboring 
from flower to flower for them, and filling their 
cells with honey. 

You may think them as stupid as you like, 
and as inconsiderable. Deal with them but 
long enough, and you shall have strange sus- 
picions. You shall begin to note a growing and 
undeniable likeness in these to "Cinderella" 
and "The Youngest Brother." Nor are these 
fairy tales, mind you, safe and unbelievable, 
shut up there in your Grimm and Andersen 
on the shelf, to be taken down only at pleas- 
ure; no, but fairytales potent and indisputable, 
hoeing your potatoes, walking about in the 
flesh in your kitchen, and hanging out your 
clothes of a Monday. 

There is, indeed, some royalty about this 
class that bodes as ill for us to ignore, as it is 
alarming for us to contemplate. If the Lord 
be for them, — and there is every reason, 
historical and romantical, to suppose that He 

102 



The Powers of the Poor 

is, — who then can be against them? Turn, 
Fortune, turn thy wheel, but these can never 
be lowered! These, I take it, are in their own 
manner imperial spirits, let kings and royal 
successions be what they may. Here, without 
cabinets or ministers, or executive or admin- 
istrative cares to weigh upon them, yet with 
what authority they go clothed! 

It is astounding, if one only becomes poor 
enough, — I say it in all soberness and sin- 
cerity, — how rich and powerful one may be- 
come. And perhaps just here it is my duty 
to submit a testimony I have up to this time 
withheld. I have said that I myself have 
been poor, but I have as yet said nothing of 
the strange unlooked-for loftiness that this 
circumstance lent me. While I was of the 
wealthy, I strongly maintained that these, 
and what we are wont to call the "upper 
classes," have the very considerable advan- 
tage, and believed it with all my heart. But 
no sooner was I downright poor, uncertain 
even where the next meals were to come from, 
than the potion, the charm, the necromancy, 
the delusion, or the truth, — have it which 
you will ! — began to work, and I myself to 
103 



Adventures in Indigence 

have a subtle suspicion, and at last a positive 
sense, of superiority. 

Who never ate his bread with tears, 
He knows ye not, ye heavenly powers! 

The wealthy, the advantageous began to 
dwindle in my eyes. How poor they were in 
real experience, in sympathy, in understand- 
ing; how wanting in fine feeling; how destitute, 
for the most part, of that only wealth worth 
acquiring, — wealth of the heart! — whereas, 
the poorer I was, the greater the wealth of 
understanding that was mine; as my moneys 
dwindled, I was made rich of the universe; a 
new sense of love and bounty was given me 
as by an unlooked-for legacy. The vast tired 
multitude going home at night, all these sud- 
denly were my own — my brothers and my 
sisters; further, it may be noted, I acquired 
the wealthy also. These too became my broth- 
ers, more chill and starved sometimes (I knew 
this now) in their luxuries than the "poor" 
in their destitution. Could one, indeed, know- 
ing any of the real values, feel a bitterness 
toward such? or could one fail to experience, 
having known any of the true humilities of 
life, a love for these also? 
104 



The Powers of the Poor 

Let it sound as paradoxical as it may, — 
I do not say it unadvisedly, — poverty is an 
enrichment, and often enough a grandeur. 
Here, indeed, in this fact — I think it by no 
means unlikely — may lie the explanation of 
many a humorously high behavior and lordli- 
ness in those of whom I have more particu- 
larly told. If this be truth, as I take it to be, 
then it lends consistency, even if a little quaint, 
to what threatened to seem but unwarrant- 
able chaos. 

Is it not probable, remembering my own 
experience, that Musgrove, Mamie, Margaret, 
and the others had with their very indigence 
acquired a compensating fortune and, by 
reason of their very destitution, inherited, as 
by lofty bequest, the universe? It should not 
be forgotten, moreover, that I had come to 
these distinctions only after years of comfort- 
able living, whereas those I have told you of 
had been born to the purple of their poverty. 
I, in serving others, have never yet been able 
to give myself the ample airs of a Margharetta. 
I have never found it possible to pull pennies 
out of people's pockets by the ^Eschylean 
tragedy of my condition, or to draw pity at 
105 



Adventures in Indigence 

will out of their hearts. I am smitten with 
silence when trouble and difficulty assail me, 
and I have an intolerable instinct against ask- 
ing for the sympathy and commiseration of 
others; whereas those better accustomed than 
myself, — as I have shown you, — how read- 
ily are they able to requisition your sympathy, 
to appropriate wholly your pity, and to confis- 
cate your possessions, your theories, and your 
ethics ! 

Yet we, mind you, in the face of these 
abilities, have assumed them to be our in- 
feriors, and have organized for them frankly 
a society for the improvement of their condi- 
tion! That we can mitigate their sufferings 
and inconveniences, lessen their cold or their 
hunger, I willingly admit; but I am not of so 
bold an intellect as to believe that we can im- 
prove their condition, or that their condition, 
take it for all in all, can be improved upon. 

If you doubt such testimony as I have 
borne, and think it too personal, there is other 
more general and considerable. Were not 
Egypt and all her power despised and tri- 
umphed over by "a colony of revolted Egyp- 
tian slaves"? Did not proud Rome go down, 
1 06 



The Powers of the Poor 

also, to a like downtrodden people? Picture 
what Rome was in her might — Rome tracing 
her ancestry to the gods ! And then look upon 
her bowed down in slavish subserviency to 
kiss the shoe of a poor fisherman ! 

And the poor then, who called themselves 
Christians — as now you would have called 
them underlings, menials, subalterns. Yes, 
and so they were. And they lived precariously 
in caves and catacombs under the surveillance 
of the emperor's guards, as our most scurvy 
poor under the police. Yet see them to-day, 
with dominion over palm and pine, and with 
control of the earth's continents. And where 
now are the Roman emperors? 

History teems with such instances. With 
what scorn do you suppose the mighty Per- 
sians in their glittering armor might have 
looked upon those few youths who in the 
dawn ''sat combing their long hair for death" 
before Marathon? When the nameless poor 
murmured outside the gates of Versailles, 
what would any of us have given for the brief 
lineage or trumpery royalty of a Marie or a 
Louis? It would not have sold for a franc to 
any one with a head for business. Even as 
107 



Adventures in Indigence 

these poor people shook the gates, almost the 
haughtiest queen of history was already on 
her way, then, and at their bidding, to become 
the Widow Capet. And that, too, for only a 
little while, and by sufferance, before they 
hurried her on to the last level of all. 

There may seem to be about them at first 
a marked futility. Only wait, and you shall see 
what a power they have! Is there need that 
they should pique or plume themselves or 
strut? They have no need to cut a dash. The 
herald's office could add nothing to their stat- 
ure. Here is no newness or recency, no inno- 
vation; here rather are tradition, custom, 
something time-honored, however little you 
may think it venerable. Here is immemorial 
usage, "whereof the memory of man runneth 
not to the contrary." 

And have these continued in the world in 
predominating numbers, despite misfortune, 
calamity, catastrophe? No; mind you, rather 
because of these! Think of a race with that 
ability! Since Cain fell into misfortune and 
was shielded of the Almighty, and Lazarus, 
for a like reason, lacked not a divine advocate, 
have these not had the special protection of 
io8 



The Powers of the Poor 

God? Can you show me any people of lands 
and property, of thrift and saving habits, of 
full granaries and honest provident stores laid 
by, who were guided by a pillar of cloud by day 
and of fire by night? who had manna and quail 
supplied them ; and an entire land swept clean 
of its rightful owners by the Lord's hand, so 
that they might come into it instead, to en- 
joy the wells they had not digged, and the 
fruits thereof which neither had they planted? 
Were it not of too great a bulk, the testi- 
mony of literature could be brought to cor- 
roborate that of history. When you read "The 
Jolly Beggars," you are informed without 
squeamishness which is the most free and pow- 
erful class in the world; and when you have 
read that other document by the same hand, 
''The Twa Dogs," you have perused a fine 
bit of testimony as to which is the happiest. 
Or if there lacked these, and there were left us 
but Arden and its gentle beggars — who could 
be in doubt? How they triumph over the rich 
and the successful and lord it felicitously in 
their poverty! What would you look to find 
these but broken and saddened — these who 
are not only beggars, mind you, but wronged 
109 



Adventures in Indigence 

men: the Duke, Orlando, Rosalind, all suf- 
fering injustice; Adam starving; Touchstone, 
Jaques, Amiens, and for the most part all of 
them, too well acquainted with the rudeness of 
the world; men who had known but too well 
the unkindness of man's ingratitude, the feign- 
ing of most friendship, the bitterness of bene- 
fits forgot. And yet, turn only to that first 
scene in the forest. If ever I set eyes on in- 
dependent gentlemen, here they are! And 
who doubts too, reading of these, that Shake- 
speare wrote of them out of his own Arden, 
out of the enrichment of his own poverty, 
and the splendors of his unsuccessful years! 

The powers of the poor! This is a matter 
to which I have often lent my speculation, and 
have striven to perceive by what rights, as of 
gods in exile, they have maintained their dig- 
nity and their supremacy; and I have won- 
dered whether one of these may not be that ne- 
cessity laid upon them to touch more nearly 
than we the realities of life. We have set 
guards at our gateways, to turn away Poverty 
or Misery or Cold or Hunger, yes, and Human 
Brotherhood and Life and Death themselves. 
Death, it is true, and some others, will not 
no 



The Powers of the Poor 

be altogether gainsaid, but enter at last into 
the lives of all of us, bringing invariably — this 
is to be noted — a great dignity to the house 
which they have visited. But to the poor 
the "heavenly powers" come, whether wel- 
come or no, and like the gods visiting mortals, 
they do not depart, save from the entirely 
unworthy, without bestowing enrichment. 

I have sat at the table of an old Philemon 
and Baucis, whose condition of poverty ap- 
peared not to be bettered by their entertain- 
ment of the great realities of life ; whose pitcher 
poured as scant as ever it did, though Death 
and Calamity had but lately visited them. 
But when you thirsted for a better draught, a 
draught not to sustain the body, but the spirit 
— then, then the miracle was evident enough! 
They filled your cup to its trembling brim, 
nor, pour as they would, could they empty 
their hearts of love and understanding. 

These are, indeed, good gifts, and of the 
gods, and there are many others; and it would 
take little to prove how much more bountifully 
the poor receive of them than the wealthier 
classes. 

Another possession, which I have noted 



Adventures in Indigence 

often among the poor, is that gayety, that 
Ughtness of heart, that almost inconsequent 
gayety, so often seen, amazingly, among them. 
Where you and I might be crushed by calam- 
ity, they can raise their heads and be glad, 
and that over some trifle. Where you might 
have gone sad and sober for weeks, Mamie 
could dance her little ragtime songs; Margaret 
could be gay with the pig; and Margharetta, 
fresh from a new downfall, could gather the 
children of her heart to her as a hen its chick- 
ens, and in blissful content think nothing of 
the morrow. This I have seen again and again. 
They are as recuperative as King David. Let 
them sin and blunder and suffer and be cast 
down, it is but for a brief season ; soon you shall 
hear the plucking of their harp and the sound 
of their psaltery, and a new song unto the 
Lord. 

As further testimony, this is, I believe, the 
place to confess that it was not in the days of 
my prosperity and happiness, but in the days 
of my poverty and sorrow, that I myself be- 
came possessed of this good gift of the gods. 
The laughter and gayety of heart of pros- 
perous years, though they may be of no mean 

112 



The Powers of the Poor 

order, seem to me but pallid things compared 
with those of a more tested season. To have 
seen the total wreckage of one's hopes, to have 
known despair and the bleak winds of the 
heath of the world, and to delight still, and 
more than ever, in the little and the gay, and to 
taste with a keener relish than ever before the 
fine-flavored humor of the world, this is to be 
rich, though one were in tatters; this is to 
be gifted, though to the last farthing one has 
been robbed. 

But there is another endowment besides all 
these, even more precious — I mean that un- 
conscious grace and dignity of spirit possessed 
by some of the poor; I mean that quiet and 
gracious acceptance of a lot which, to our 
reckoning, seems but bare and difficult; that 
gentle and persistent kindliness of men and 
women toward a world which, it seems to us, 
has so roughly and despitefully used them. 

This I take to be the greatest of the gifts 
that the gods confer upon the poor ; and being 
so, it is fitting that it should not be indis- 
criminately bestowed. You shall not meet it 
commonly or often; yet here or there will be 
found some true ruler of his kind, looking out 
9 113 



I Adventures in Indigence 

on the world with this kindly and gracious 
spirit. I have known some few such myself, 
and one notably; though my acquaintance 
with him was but of short duration, yet it 
summed up for me and made whole the frag- 
mentary virtues of the poor, and set a lasting 
seal upon my love and understanding of them. 

IX 
HORATIO 

I SAW him first selling papers by a subway 
entrance. The day was cold, and he had that 
peculiarly pinched look of those who are both 
ill-nourished and ill-clad; and yet you could 
not without presumption have called him piti- 
ful. There was a kind of simple grandeur about 
him which I am at a loss adequately to de- 
scribe: a thing rather to be embodied in myth 
and legend. 

The "envy of the gods" has been variously 
set out in tale and story. Prometheus defy- 
ing divinity is a moving enough figure, hurling 
curses back at his superior, and visited by 
Asia, Panthea, and the nymphs and Oceanides. 
But it would need a new legend, it seems to 
114 



Horatio 

me, to embody that loftiness which, in a simi- 
lar bondage, hurls no curses, breathes no com- 
plaint, nor asks even to be spared, if that be 
possible; a gentleness which, without the least 
leaning to humility, preserves a generous out- 
look, triumphant in its persistent kindliness as 
Prometheus in his unconquered might; un- 
broken, unlowered; bound, yet attaining some- 
how to a continued generosity and bestowal. 

It might seem, by the look of this man, that 
Fate had come to hate one she could so little 
bend; for not only was he ragged and pinched, 
but there w^as about his delicate face and the 
great slenderness of the body, only too cer- 
tainly, the mark of some physical ravage, and 
of an overborne endurance. To the casual ob- 
server, he was but a man selling newspapers 
at the entrance to the subway; to those of 
thoughtful and speculative observation, he 
was a man standing within a few feet of his 
grave, and likely at almost any moment to 
feel on his shoulder, or dimly on his chilly 
hand, the summoning touch of Hermes, 
Leader of Souls. 

There was about him a most amiable pa- 
tience and courtesy which had not at all the 
115 



Adventures in Indigence 

color of resignation. Indeed, to speak of res- 
ignation in his case would have been to im- 
pute to him riches and hopes he had not. I 
can give you no idea how much more courteous 
he seemed than his destiny. The only Asia 
who ever visited him, I am sure, was a woman, 
fat and comfortable looking, who sold papers 
also, at the other end of the subway entrance, 
behind the shelter of its glass. She used to 
come over sometimes while I was buying my 
paper of him, to ask him to make change, blow- 
ing on her hands in a wholesome manner, or 
beating her arms like a cabby. That she never 
sympathized with him, I felt sure, not alone 
because of the general look and contour of her, 
but because — as I have tried to show you — 
he was not the man to whom one would pre- 
sume to tender sympathy. 

As I came to know him better, I began to 
take the keenest pleasure in his smile, which 
was always ready. He never let the salutation 
go at a mere ''good-morning." To my banal 
" Pretty cold to-day!" he would reply smihng, 
and even while turning his shoulder to receive 
the cut of the wind less directly, "Yes, but 
bracing"; or, while his blue fingers fumbled 
ii6 



Horatio 

for change, "Not quite so cold as yesterday"; 
or it was, "Well, the children like snow for 
Christmas"; or, "This snow will give work to 
the poor, cleaning the streets" ; or, if the white 
flakes turned to threads of rain, "This will 
save the city a great deal." 

There never was any bravado in this, only 
the incomparable gentleness and the winning 
smile. If Fate lingered about, malicious, hop- 
ing to hear him at last complain, she might as 
well have given over her eavesdropping. I, 
going to him for the daily "Times," and not 
infrequently with a tired spirit and a heavy 
heart, would find that, in return for my penny, 
he had given me, not only the morning paper, 
but a new courage, or a heartening and pre- 
cious shame of my own discouragement, or, 
oftener still, a new faith in the world. So it 
was that he stood there, day after day, in the 
freezing weather, dispensing these benefits, a 
peculiar and moving royalty legible in his 
person. 

If those who read of him here pity him, it 

can only be because my words give but such a 

poor idea of his great dignity. Those who saw 

him with a clear eye, could they pity him, do 

117 



Adventures in Indigence 

you think? And I — I who had cried out more 

than once, under how much less provocation, 

against the duress of fortune — was it my 

right to give him commiseration? Marry, 

heaven forbid! Again and again, as I went 

from him, my mind suggested, rather, noble 

likenesses, and sought to find some simile to 

match him. Once it was, "The gods go in 

low disguises"; again, "Great spirits now on 

earth are sojourning"; and once the words of 

Amiens, addressed to the Duke, seemed to me 

to blend in with his behaviors : — 

"Happy is your Grace, 
That can translate the stubbornness of fortune 
Into so quiet and so sweet a style." 

And again, I thought once that the royal 

Dane, addressing Horatio, offered me words 

befitting : — 

"For thou hast been 
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing; 
A man that fortune's buffets and rewards 
Has ta'en with equal thanks; and blest are those 
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled 
That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger 
To sound what stop she please." 

One day I bought him a pair of woolen 

gloves, and all the way to his corner I kept 

rehearsing an absurd speech of presentation, 

ii8 



Horatio 

designed to relieve both him and me of em- 
barrassment. He must not know that I had 
bought them for him! I wanted to spare my- 
self that! So I concocted what is currently 
known as a "cock-and-bull" story; but, as I 
look back on it and its results, I lean to be- 
lieving that I never perpetrated a finer bit of 
fiction. I give it now without shame. 

"My husband," said I, fumbling for my 
penny, "has been very ill — a long while." 

"Well, now, I'm sorry!" said Horatio 
gravely, and without the least wonder, ap- 
parently, why this should have been proffered. 

"And the doctors think," I stumbled on, 
digging in my purse, "there 's no likelihood in 
the world at all he will be out of his bed before 
the summer." 

"Ah, that 's very hard for a man if he's 
active," said Horatio, speaking with full sym- 
pathy, as of one who knew. 

"And ^0," said I, putting my penny in his 
hand, taking the "Times," and mentally be- 
shrewing me the clumsiness of language, "and 
so, you see," — here I brought them forth, — 
"there's a pair of gloves of his he won't have 
even the chance to wear; and they're almost 
119 



Adventures in Indigence 

as good as new, and — I just thought — may 
be—" 

Here words deserted me. I appealed direct- 
ly to his eyes. These were fixed, kind and gray, 
on the gloves. He was already taking them. 

" Indeed, I 'd like very much to wear them," 
he said, "but I'm sorry he can't be wearing 
them himself. May be he '11 be well sooner than 
you think, though. Sickness is a bad thing. 
These are very warm," — this with his de- 
lightful smile, and he began drawing one of 
them on, — "I'm very much obliged. But 
may be he'll be well sooner than you think. 
I 'm sure I hope so." 

It was a busy morning. The early subway 
was pouring forth its crowds as an early chim- 
ney, just started, its smoke. I was glad to 
mingle and fade among them. 

The next morning, he was ready, may be 
even a little eager, as I approached. He had 
my paper doubled and waiting for me, and 
waiting too, his gentle inquiry, " Is he better? " 

"Yes," said I, "I think so — a little." 

Some one else wanted a paper and we said 
no more. But each day after that he asked me, 
and I gave him a cautious, not too enthusiastic 

120 



Horatio 

report, for my patient must remain indoors 
till sharp weather and all possible need of 
gloves were past. So, he was only a little bet- 
ter. I took pains once to add, "A long illness 
is very discouraging." 

"That it is," Horatio assented. "But you'll 
forget that when he's well." 

So we continued in our courtesies and our 
sympathies; I very pleased and hardly con- 
science-stricken, to have been able to give him 
what I knew he must have cherished a good 
deal more than the gloves, something, indeed, 
for the warming of his heart — the chance, say 
rather the right, to extend his so experienced 
sympathy, and the opportunity to give, to 
one in need of them, some of the stored-up 
riches of his spirit. So, his own days growing 
short, and the shadow of his own cares length- 
ening, he yet smiled daily, as he gave me of 
these riches, and wished me a happy sunrise 
of my hopes and a good-morrow. 

One day he was not there. His line spirit 
had fared forth. I can still feel the shock and 
sudden loss it was to me. I went over to Asia, 
or Panthea, selling her papers, and questioned 
her. Was he ill? 

J2I 



Adventures in Indigence 

"He went very sudden, ma'am, I believe. 
His wife came to say so. I 'm selling his papers 
now. What will you have? The 'Times'?" 

Hermes, the kindly, had beckoned him from 
his "undefeated, undishonored field," and he 
had gone, eager and gentle there, too, I have 
no doubt. 

It was but a little while that I knew him, 
but the influence of him abides. He has lent 
something to life which even the least noble 
cannot take from it. The sorry old derelict, 
his poor old red lantern eyes looking out of his 
dark face, when I give him a dole, receives 
it, not from me, I think, after all, but from 
some gentleness which Horatio lends me as a 
legacy. 

He was, of course, supreme of his class; but 
by that very supremacy he made plain to me 
many things concerning those less than him- 
self, but of his same lineage. It is by no means 
unUkely, I think, that Musgrove, Mamie, Mar- 
garet, Margharetta, and the rest, so much less 
worthy than Horatio, yet glimpsed their heri- 
tage also, though in some dim adumbrated 
manner of their own, and were unconsciously 
affected and aggrandized by it. 

122 



Horatio 

Although I have spoken of them throughout 
with lightness, and have laughed at their 
amazing follies, yet I know well that there is a 
solemnity forever attendant upon the poor. 
There is without doubt some unexpected en- 
dowment in suffering and privation, some sur- 
prising enrichment in the common lot. Have 
it as you will, there is no honor so high, or dis- 
tinction so covetable, as to be a sharer of hu- 
man joys and sorrows, and an intimate, even 
though it be in misery and solitude, of the 
hearts of men; and to this brotherhood, shar- 
ing the common lot, the poor undeniably con- 
tribute by far the greater numbers. 

There is, to the very end, something tinsel 
and tawdry in the trappings of special privi- 
lege. The splendors of the wealthy are but a 
brief pageant — stage properties, donned for 
a little while to lend some height and dignity 
to those of but human stature after all. The 
beggar who looks on, as did Horatio, at this 
pageant, without envy, and who, looking on, 
gives a gentle patronage to the rich, does so 
not without warrant. The greater splendors 
and possessions are his own. Let them deco- 
rate their stately halls; let them transport, as I 
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Adventures in Indigence 

have known them to do, entire ceilings from 
Venetian palaces, tapestries from chambers of 
those who also, long ago, once were great — 
the glory of the sun will not be subsidized, the 
halls of the morning are lit with unmatchable 
splendors, and the palace chambers of the 
night are hung by mightier ministrants with 
tapestries of a finer weave, and ceiled with 
stars for the mere vagrant and the vagabond 
who shall sleep some day beneath them, with- 
out monument and unremembered. 

Do not these know life more nearly? Who 
has flattered them? Who has shielded them 
from infancy, from the great powers? Who 
has defended them? Have not these, like 
CEdipus and other kings' sons, been exposed 
upon the very rocks of time; and have they 
not survived that circumstance? Have these 
not dealt more intimately with the elements? 
Who had enabled them to avoid the cut of the 
winter, or to evade the stroke of the summer? 
to elude the arrows of sickness that fly by 
night, or the pestilence that walks in the 
noonday? Sorrow and Death have dealt with 
them more nearly, and without ambassadors. 
They have had audience with reality; they 
124 



Horatio 

have talked with Life without interpreters. 

He who loves this world, and has found it 
good on such terms, may be allowed his rea- 
sonable preference; he who speaks fondly still 
of life, who has had such communings, may 
speak with some authority. Horatio's smile 
was worth the pleasantness and optimism of a 
thousand who have never made change with 
blue fingers, or shrunk from the cut of the cold. 

There are those who would patronize and 
pity such as Horatio. It can only be, then, 
that they know this world but little, and still 
childishly count riches to be but money, and 
poverty to be but lack of it. 

And if you tell me that none but a senti- 
mentalist would call poverty an enrichment, 
then I can only assume that you have never 
been poor ; and if you tell me that the high be- 
havior of Horatio is at the best but endurance, 
even then, could I grant you so much, the 
argument still would hold. Even so, Horatio 
endured life with a noble grace, and helped 
others to do so; even so, he was able still to 
find pleasure in a fate from which the wealthy 
would shrink in horror, and lovable traits in one 
they would have called his bitterest enemy. He 
125 



Adventures in Indigence 

had blessed the life which had cursed him, and 
had loved it though it had despitef ully used him. 
So he triumphed — yet without pride ; nor 
did one hear in his spirit 's victory any hint of 
animosity, or talk of reprisals, or bitterness, 
or demand for indemnities, or hidden hate. 
Rather, he was to be found each day unde- 
feated in his impregnable gentleness, that still 
unf alien province in which he dwelt. His were 
some incalculable riches of the spirit which 
Poverty had heaped up and amassed for him 
through those years when his fingers handled 
without complaint the miserable pennies; his 
was some towering strength under the dis- 
guise of the weak and broken body; like that 
Olympian glory fabled inevitably to appear 
some time, under the mortal humility of gods 
in exile. There was about him, for all his slen- 
derness, something grand, something epic, 
and allegorical. He might have stood as a 
symbol of a downtrodden people, such nations 
as the world (be it said to our shame) sees 
still, and that not in small numbers — crushed, 
oppressed by the arrogant, the strong, yet 
still surviving and giving to the other nations 
their gifts of gay song or heroic endurance, and 
126 



Adventures in Indigence 

out of an incredible bounty still bestowing love 
and kindness and beauty on the world which 
has behaved toward them without mercy. 

Look, if you will, at the beggar nations of 
the world, and search the heart of the poor 
among peoples, and I am convinced that you 
will find in these also corroborative evidence 
of truths I have tried here to touch upon but 
lightly. Let be their follies and their mistakes 
and all their incredible assumptions : who shall 
declare that poverty has not enriched them 
likewise? And among them, shall you not find 
high and royal and single spirits, who, like 
Horatio, have both known and loved the 
world and triumphed over it without ani- 
mosity? To have known and yet to have loved 
the world ! Is not this the real heart of the mat- 
ter? Is not this the true test after all, and the 
indisputable mark of a king's son? And shall 
you not find it oftener among the poor than 
elsewhere? For he cannot be said to know the 
world who has never been at its mercy; even 
as only he can be said to have triumphed over 
it, who, having suffered all things at its hands, 
yet loves it with unconquerable fidelity. 



GUESTS 

I 
RELATIONS OF THE SPIRIT 

In his essay on "Character" Emerson 
points to the mutation and change of religions 
and theological teachings, and then thunders 
characteristically, "The moral sentiment alone 
is omnipotent." Now, Emerson never takes 
away anything traditional and cherished, but 
he puts something nobler into your hands in 
place of it. Hear him: "The lines of religious 
sects are very shifting, their platforms un- 
stable; the whole science of theology of great 
uncertainty. No man can tell what religious 
revolutions await us in the next years." Then 
with thundering assurance he gives us the cov- 
eted reassurance. "But the science of ethics 
has no mutation. The pulpit may shake, but 
this platform will not. All the victories of re- 
ligion belong to the moral sentiment." 

I wish it were given me to speak with some 
such force and truth of what we are wont to 
call education. Theories are very shifting; the 
10 129 



Guests 

whole science of instruction is of great uncer- 
tainty. No man can tell what pedagogic re- 
volutions await us. But the educational value 
of life has no uncertainty. Schools may come 
and go; this, the school of life, remains — the 
greatest of them all. The highest attainments 
of mankind are due to its teachings. 

In still another essay, Emerson, depicting, 
we suppose, the ideal not the academic scholar, 
declares with the same tonic forcefulness that 
"his use of books is occasional and infinitely 
subordinate ; that he should read a little proud- 
ly, as one who knows the original and cannot 
therefore very highly value the copy." Always, 
life is to Emerson the greater art, and learning, 
literature, and all other arts whatsoever, but 
lesser things. ''You send your child to the 
schoolmaster," he flings out, "but it is the 
schoolboys who educate him." 

Precisely. When shall we have taken wholly 
to heart the so obvious truth? It cannot be 
but the author of the "Greatest Show on 
Earth" was right. The world likes to be hum- 
bugged; else why all this elaboration of edu- 
cational systems and theories, educational 
forms and creeds, this multiplication of mod- 
130 



Relations of the Spirit 

ern methods and "didactic material"? These 
are, indeed, but things that change and fluc- 
tuate, and already are on the way to being 
superseded. Meanwhile the older and larger 
schoolroom of Life never closes its doors, makes 
no bid for patronage, retains its old teachers, 
changes its methods not at all, and still turns 
out the best pupils. 

My own education is generally thought to be 
above the average. It is my belief that it 
would be far less considerable but for those 
various circumstances which in my childhood 
denied me much schooling, and accorded me a 
good deal of staying at home. 

The home of those days had, it is true, a 
far greater educative value than can be claim- 
ed justly for the home of the present day, 
owing mainly — I hold it almost beyond dis- 
pute — to the fact that it was more given to 
the practice of hospitality and the entertain- 
ment of guests. 

Of the homes of my day my own was, I be- 
lieve, fairly typical. Though a full description 
of it and of the men and women who fre- 
quented it would make a colored recital, so 
would a like description of the homes of many 
131 



Guests 

others besides myself, who were children also 
at that time. I do not mean that such homes 
were entirely the rule; yet there were enough 
of them certainly to constitute a type. They 
were not likely to be luxurious; those of peo- 
ple of less position nowadays are far finer. 

The old house of my childhood was a large 
and comfortable one, with low-ceilinged, well- 
proportioned rooms, and wide verandas. Its 
furnishings were in taste, and contributed 
greatly to its character. The big Holland sec- 
retary, with its bulging sides and secret drawer, 
was a very piece of romance; the tall clock, 
with its brass balls and moon face, the old 
clawfoot mahogany tables, the long scroll sofa, 
the heavy scroll mahogany sideboard, were as 
mellow in tone as the old Martin guitar on 
which men and women, beaux and belles of a 
past generation, had played ; or the harp that 
stood in a corner, all gold in the afternoon 
sunlight; or the square Steck piano of the front 
room, a true grandee in its day. Several really 
well-painted portraits looked down from the 
walls, and added a certain stateliness to the 
warmth of every welcome. 

Many people, recalling that home, have 
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Relations of the Spirit 

spoken to me since of a peculiarly warm and 
beautiful light which on sunny days was pres- 
ent in the three lower rooms — parlor, sitting- 
room, and dining-room — that opened one into 
another. 

This light, which had first to make its way 
past maples and a few pear trees, entered, it 
seemed, with an especial graciousness, touch- 
ing softly and lingeringly the old mahogany 
as it went; and from morning until late after- 
noon abode in the rooms with a kind of mel- 
low gentleness hardly to be described. There 
was something well-mannered, unobtrusive, in 
its coming and going, as though it were con- 
scious of being a guest there ; a kind of gracious 
enjoyment it seemed to take in the place, no- 
ticeable in its gentle behaviors among the dark 
colors and the old books, and in its manner of 
moving about delicately from object to object, 
and pausing at last, as it always did, before the 
tall pier-glass, as though it pleased it to reflect 
on the three long rooms, doubled to twice their 
length, before it slipped away again past the 
western windows and departed across the hills. 

I have mentioned carefully the perpetual 
coming and going of the sunlight because it 
133 



Guests 

seems to me symbolical of that coming and 
going of guests which perpetually lighted the 
old house, lent it its chief charm, and gave me 
my most memorable schooling. The educative 
value of life has no uncertainty. These men 
and women who came and went as guests were 
my first memorable lessons of life, and, as I 
take it, they were lessons marvelously well 
adapted to the understanding and needs of a 
little child. 

I would not seem to undervalue the silent 
influence and worth of that material loveliness 
which was often found in the old houses of 
that day, and was evident in my own home; 
but I believe this alone could have done little 
to educate me. Such loveliness was but a 
means to an end. I would be loath to give great 
credit for my education to the furniture, old 
and interesting as it was. The real credit is 
due, first, to the customs of that time, which 
made hospitality one of the first virtues; and, 
second, to the guests who, coming there, fur- 
nished the house with its best opportunities, 
and incidentally — I beg you to note that 
word — afforded me, there can be no doubt, 
the better part of my education. 
134 



Relations of the Spirit 

How far have we gone, ''progressed," as we 
say, in a short span of years ! I am still a young 
woman, yet guests are not indeed what they 
once were. There were poverty and riches in 
those days, too, but the "high cost of living," 
that phrase forever turning up nowadays, 
was a bad penny not yet coined, and guest- 
discouraging "flats" were anomalies that my 
old home town rejected. 

Guests came and stayed then as they do not 
now. Visiting was still in those days one of the 
accomplishments of life; a gracious habit not 
yet broken up by ubiquitous hotels, ten, fif- 
teen, twenty stories high; not yet rendered 
superfluous by trains every hour on the hour, 
or old-fashioned by scudding automobiles 
which, like Aladdin Abushamut's magic sofa, 
snatch up whole parties of people, and in the 
twinkling of an eye set them down in new lands 
with hardly time for greeting or farewell. 

Life may be more provident, compact, con- 
venient nowadays. I am not prepared to dis- 
pute it. But of one thing I am certain: the 
modern child in this almost guestless age has 
no such chance to acquire a broad education 
out of school hours as had I, whose childhood 
135 



Guests 

flourished when guests were the rule and the 
tinkling of the doorbell was more likely than 
not to be a summons to a fine adventure in 
visitors. 

Ah, there was an education! An education 
indeed! Its A B C was that every child of 
the house should be delighted to be turned out 
of his or her bed, to sleep four in a four-poster, 
or on a mattress on the floor, so that one more 
guest might be given welcome. Its simple 
mathematics were concerned mainly with the 
addition of guests, the eager subtraction of 
one's own comforts, the multiplications of wel- 
comes, and the long divisions of all delights and 
pleasures, which by some kind of higher cal- 
culus miraculously increased the meaning and 
richness of life. Its geography, if any, was no 
geography at all, beyond the fact that the 
guest-room was the sunniest and largest and 
best in the house, and that exports from all 
the other rooms flowed into it and rendered it 
the most desirable and the "most important 
city." As to history, it consisted of people at 
all times and of all ages, and the traditions of 
men and women of many types. It concerned 
itself, not with the succession of kings and 
136 



Relations of the Spirit 

durations of dynasties so much as with a suc- 
cession of visitors and the probable length of 
their stay. 

I cannot say what enlightenment or learn- 
ing or benefit the guests themselves derived 
from these visits; though, if measured by the 
frequent length of their sojourn, these must 
have been very considerable; but I do know 
that we, the children of that household, gained 
high benefits immensely educative; I know 
that we assimilated much knowledge, and at- 
tained to much learning of a very high order, 
intellectual and spiritual; and what is best of 
all, I know that in that old home, antedating 
and long anticipating Madame Montessori 
and her "Houses of Childhood," we learned 
with neither desk, blackboard, nor semblance 
of schooling, and never for a moment so much 
as dreamed that we were being taught. 

This is not the place to enter on a discussion 
of the Montessori method. Briefly Madame 
Montessori's chief tenets may be stated thus: 
Liberty for the child; a careful education of 
the child's senses, resulting in an extraordi- 
nary sense-control to which the child attains 
without consciousness of learning. 
137 



Guests 

The "didactic material" (frankly so called 
by the author of this distinctive system of edu- 
cation) is material by means of which the 
child's senses are trained. It consists of many 
parts. To name only a few — there are one hun- 
dred and twenty-eight color-tablets; thirty- 
six geometrical insets ; three series of thirty-six 
cards; the "dimension material" consists of 
nine cylinders, each differing from the rest in 
height and diameter, ten quadrilateral prisms, 
ten four-sided striped rods, and so on. This 
and much more is the equipment daily used in 
the "Houses of Childhood." 

The home of my childhood was bare, bare 
of such things. Neither cubes nor cylinders 
were there that I remember, nor thermatic 
tests, nor color-tablets, nor quadrilateral 
prisms ; and yet — 

What was there of especial value? There 
was, first of all, the household. "The house- 
hold," to quote Emerson further, "is a school 
of power. There within the door learn the 
tragi-comedy of human life. Here is the sin- 
cere thing, the wondrous composition for 
which day and night go round. In that rou- 
tine are the sacred relations, the passions that 
138 



Relations of the Spirit 

bind and sever. Here is poverty and all the 
wisdom its hated necessities can teach; here 
labor drudges, here affections glow, here the 
secrets of character are told, the guards of 
man, the guards of woman, the compensations 
which, like angels of justice, pay every debt; 
the opium of custom, whereof all drink and 
many go mad. Here is Economy, and Glee, 
and Hospitality, and Ceremony, and Frank- 
ness, and Calamity, and Death, and Hope." 

Didactic material enough, if one chooses to 
call it that. But, besides all this, there were 
guests — guests who came and lingered, guests 
of an almost incredible variety. By recalling 
a few of them I can best explain somewhat of 
their influence on my life. 

The first one I remember very clearly was 
a beautiful young lady, — beautiful to me, — 
who spent I believe about six months with us. 
I might have been a trifle over five years old. 
I remember her with great exactness. Certain 
sparkling characteristics that she wore as 
noticeably as the several heavy rings on her 
white hand, shine still with surprising clear- 
ness in my memory. 

She was slender. She affected overskirts. 
139 



Guests 

She wore elbow-sleeves, and trains, though she 
could hardly have been over eighteen or nine- 
teen. Her hair was plastered on her fashion- 
ably high forehead in what were then known 
as "water-waves." 

On a collar of box-plaited lace she often wore 
a jet necklace, set in gold, a kind of jewelry 
much in fashion at that time, I believe. Also 
I remember that she had a pair of lemon-col- 
ored kid gloves; and on dress occasions she 
wore heavy gold bracelets. 

But these were all as trifles to the fact that 
she sang. That was her crowning glory. My 
mother sang sweetly, too, the beautiful songs 
of "her day": "Flow Gently, Sweet Afton," 
"Lightly the Troubadour," "Ye Banks and 
Braes," "The Gypsy's Warning," "Roll On, 
Silver Moon," "Believe Me If All Those En- 
dearing Young Charms" — and many more. 
When she sang them, she played on the old 
Steck piano or softly plucked the strings of the 
old Martin guitar — simple and trill-less ac- 
companiments. 

But you. Miss Lou Brooks! You, oh, you! 
— compounded of every creature's best, — 
could sing the old and simple songs, if you 
140 



Relations of the Spirit 

chose, and very graciously, for any one who 
asked for them; but better still if, left to your 
own preference, you could take your seat how 
languidly at the piano, how gracefully play a 
prelude in which the white jeweled hands fol- 
lowed each other up and down the keyboard 
over and under, in what moods and fancies, in 
what rippling runs and rapid arpeggios; now 
lighting to flutter in a twinkling trill, with 
jewel-flash, like whirring hummingbirds; now 
resting humble, two meek white doves, in the 
long and waited-for preliminary pause. Then, 
you could break forth at last into what burst 
of passion and fire of song ! 

I can close my eyes still and see her. I have 
not a good memory, but the words come to me 
almost unerring across the past (and I have to 
remind you that I was a little over five years 
old) : — 

"The stars shine o'er his pathway! 
[Long pause, with the white hands quivering on the pressed 
keys!] 
"The trees bend back their leaves, 

[Languid softness] 
"To guide him to the meadow 
Among the golden sheaves; 
[Trills and expectancy!] 

141 



Guests 

"Where stand I, loving, longing, 
And list'ning while I wait 
To the nightingale's sweet singing, 

Sweet singing to its mate. 
Singing! — Singing! [The last, soft like an 
echo] 
Swe-e-eet singing to-oo its mate! " 

[More trills and arpeggios to send shivers of delight over 
you — then in a new measure.] 

" Come, for my arms are empty. 
Come for the day is long, 
Turn the darkness into glory; — 
The sorrow into song! " 

[More pauses of which you were glad — then a begin- 
ning again of all delight.] 

"I hear his footfall's music; 
I feel his presence near. 
All my soul responsive answers 

And tells me he is here! 
O stars, shine out your brightest ! 
[This with eyes cast to where the stars should have been] 
"O nightingale, sing sweet; — 
To guide him to me waiting 

And speed his flying feet; — 
To guide him to me waiting. 
And speed his flying feet! 

This was what they did in a world outside 

the walls of my childish experience ! — they 

sang like that! — of such things! I did not 

know what it meant save in some incomplete 

142 



Relations of the Spirit 

half-lunar way; but its effect drew me, and, 
like the seasons and tides of the moon, changed 
the face of the earth for me. 

Further, it should be noted that I heard 
this song, not only on one occasion, not de- 
tached, isolated, as at a concert. Here was 
nothing paid for cold-bloodedly at a box-office ; 
here was something all woven in with the 
daily chance of life. I heard the song many a 
time. I might come upon it unexpected when 
I woke from my nap. I might be drawn from 
my toys by it to the more desirable pleasure 
of standing big-eyed by the piano while such 
glory as this rolled around about me; or eat 
my bowl of bread and milk in the early even- 
ing to the accompaniment of it ; or try to keep 
the Sandman on my pillow from throwing the 
last handful of sand until the final note of it 
was sung. 

Miss Brooks was, I believe, the daughter of 
an army ofificer. She had lived in various parts 
of the world ; common on her lips were tales of 
a life wholly different from that which I knew. 

To my eyes, water-waves and all, she was 
incredibly beautiful. Moreover, — and here 
you see the fine discriminating points which 
143 



Guests 

children make, — she was engaged ; already 
selected; chosen; set apart! I cannot tell you 
what glamour that lent her in my eyes. Child- 
psychology is not a thing that always can be 
reduced to measurement of reflexes and the 
like. I responded to all this by some unmeas- 
ured law of the soul. This knowledge and ap- 
preciation of her — or of her type, if you pre- 
fer — was as distinct and yet intangible a 
thing as the light of the prism. The sun fell 
on her and was changed to color. I could not 
touch or define her charm, but it was there; 
and the color and wonder of it seemed to fall 
across me too as I sat near her, and upon my 
sun-browned hands, if they touched her, until 
I could see colored jewels of rings on them too, 
as there might be, and as I hoped there would 
be some day. 

I thought then that I was fond of her. Cer- 
tainly her word was law to me. I know that I 
used to run my little legs tired to wait upon 
her. Her smiles and favors were precious to 
me as only the favors of the beautiful and the 
gifted can be to a little child. The tap of her 
fan on my cheek or my hand satisfied me alto- 
gether with life. 

144 



Relations of the Spirit 

But I was too near her then to judge of her 
fairly. I know now the truth of the matter. I 
have never seen her since. The glamour of her 
presence no longer colors and impedes the 
white truth. She was not the most beautiful 
young lady in the world, as I so generously 
took her to be. She was not the only person in 
the world who could play dazzling accompani- 
ments, and sing to melt one's soul, and make 
one a stranger to one's self. She was not the 
only one in the universe who knew the dim 
and lovely secret chambers of a little child's 
nature. She was after all, only, indeed, by 
courtesy, Miss Lou Brooks. For she was less 
and more than all this: she was a guest; a 
passing influence; an ineffaceable impression; 
a glorious experience; a far adventure in new 
lands; a glimpse into other worlds unknown; 
a new planet swum into my ken. She was 
a magic mirror held up to me — one in 
which I could for the first time clearly see my- 
self as I might be; she was a glass of fashion, a 
mould of form. In her I saw moving evidences 
of a world more wonderful than any of my 
fancy; she was a passing guest in the house, 
yes, but a permanency in the scheme of things — 

II 145 



Guests 

a very piece of life itself; and the knowledge 
of her, an acquirement in learning and an ac- 
quisition in education. The educative value of 
life has no uncertainty. 

Let Montessori children in * ' Houses of Child- 
hood " feel of wooden circles and quadrangles 
and be taught with care the words "round," 
"square" ; let them touch sandpaper and know 
thereby "this is rough," or linen and appre- 
hend "this is smooth." I, a child of the same 
age, needed nothing of such information. I 
knew smooth and rough more nearly by the 
mere chance touch of my play-roughened hand 
on her fine satiny one; I, of a like age, wholly 
lacking in cubes and cylinders and color-slabs, 
was learning nevertheless to discriminate be- 
tween short and long, heavy and light, were it 
but by dread of her departure, or the length of 
her train. 

Put beside Miss Lou Brooks and all that 
she taught me and revealed to me any didac- 
tic material you may choose, and I wonder if 
it compares with her. Place beside her most 
of the lessons learned from books. The rule of 
three is useful, but I would not exchange her 
for it. I might do without my multiplication- 
146 



Relations of the Spirit 

tables, and indeed do get along without them 
fairly well, never having learned the seven, 
eight, and nine tables properly. But these I 
take to be but subordinate things — pawns, 
or, at the very best, but bishops and knights 
of the game, limited to move in certain lines 
without deviation, and not to be compared 
with a queen, who can move here or there at 
will, taking, disconcerting, winning, and set- 
ting the whole of life into new relations. 

I have named Miss Lou Brooks first be- 
cause she made the first strong impression on 
me; but she was only one of many not less 
memorable. She was indeed but one star in a 
certain notable constellation of guests, which 
shone in one quarter of my heavens. 

Belonging to the same constellation, though 
of a different magnitude, was the young Ger- 
man army officer, for instance, who came all 
the way from Germany, where my brother in 
his Wanderjahr had met him. His visit was 
short, but the glory of it enduring. I was not 
yet seven. I remember how he rose out of 
respect for me when I entered the room; how 
he clicked his heels together and stood formal 
and attendant; how he drew out my chair for 
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GJu e's't s 

me at the table, and saw me seated with all the 
respect due an empress. To be allowed to come 
and sit in my brief pique dress at table with 
him and his shoulder-straps was an essay in 
form and a treatise on self-respect. 

As brilliant a star, but of a steely blue ra- 
diance, was the physician-scientist, Doctor 
Highway. He would be classified readily now 
as a Christian gentleman of highest honor, 
brilliant gifts, and scientific attainments. But 
the name scientist was not in those days worn 
so easily. Huxley and Darwin were old but 
yet alive, as were many who still believed them 
to be emissaries of the devil. 

Doctor Highway loved truth, he hated false- 
hood, and this with so much fervor and so 
little compromise that he was pointed out by 
some as an atheist. He was perpetually in- 
viting argument, but he, or she, had courage 
who accepted the invitation. Once, when he 
expatiated on the marvels of mechanical 
music-boxes, an older sister of mine, in her 
early teens, ventured boldly into the open with 
the tentative remark that, wonderful as such 
music might be, might it not nevertheless 
lack soul? 

148 



Relations of the Spirit 

I can see him still. He jerked sharply in his 
chair. He flung his penetrating glance at her 
and at her only. He said, with a sharpness 
that had all the effect of anger, " What do you 
mean hy soul!!" 

You have seen a too bold rabbit scuttle into 
a hole at the near sound of a gun. My sister to 
outward appearances was still there; but to 
outward appearances only. She was indeed 
gone, vanished, obliterated, annihilated — dis- 
appeared as effectually as though the earth 
had swallowed her up. I have no record of the 
time when she again ventured into the open, but 
I would be willing to think it was not for years. 

I remember supper-tables at which his con- 
versations and brilliancy presided. I remem- 
ber sharp revolutionary statements that fell 
from him as to Jonah and the whale, the flood ; 
geological testimony as to the length of time 
consumed in the creation of the world; all 
given with his fine clear face lit up with a kind 
of righteous indignation, and his hand brought 
down at last so that the glass and silver and 
myself jumped suddenly. 

No thunderbolt fell on the house those 
nights, though I watched for it with anxious 
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Guests 

waiting. Sometimes I think his was the be- 
ginning of my own courage; for whatever 
moral bravery was in me rose, I think, to 
honor this greater courage of his — a sub- 
altern saluting a superior officer. When he 
was by I listened, fascinated. In these long 
years since he is gone, I too have loved truth ; 
and I could wish for him now, sometimes, that 
the too-complacent guests and cutlery and 
glassware of our modern dinner-tables might 
be so startled and shocked by the thunder of 
as righteous a sincerity. 

There was also — how warmly contrasted 
with Doctor Highway ! — the young Byronic 
musician with the extraordinary tenor voice. 
He was the pride of his family, and to their 
dismay was resolved to go on the opera stage. 
He treated me as an equal and, dispensing 
largesse, wrote in my autograph book one 
day, in a fine stirring hand: "Music my only 
love, the only bride I'll ever claim." Later, 
it is true, he seemed to have repented his re- 
solve and forgotten the album, for I believe 
that he claimed some two brides besides mu- 
sic; but this did not alter his educational 
value; that remained unspoiled. 
150 



Relations of the Spirit 

There was, too, that great flashing fiery 
star, Mrs. Rankin, at work at the time of her 
visit on a drama, "Herod and Mariamne." 
She had a mannish face ; she wore heavy rings 
on somewhat mannish hands, and was, no 
doubt, — it is now revealed to me, — an un- 
classified suffragette, born untimely, denied, 
cut off by the custom of those days from the 
delights of militancy, foredoomed to pass out 
of life with never the joy of smashing a single 
window. 

She talked much of injustice. She had a big 
voice and a small opinion of men. This it is 
not unreasonable to suppose they reciprocated 
with a still more diminutive opinion of her. 

One might think from all this that she should 
have been a pamphleteer. She was not. She 
was by all odds and incongruities a poetess, 
driven by the inexorable muse to daily ses- 
sions with Mariamne. Mariamne! Ah, what a 
subject for her — for her! 

She must have absolute quiet. She must be 
undisturbed. During her stay we would romp 
in from our play to find my mother with a 
finger on her lips. Above stairs Mrs. Rankin 
might be pacing her room, declaiming, to the 
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Guests 

hearing of her own judicial ear only, the 
speeches of Mariamne, delivered in the voice 
of Herod, and the speeches of Herod, in a 
voice that should have been that of Mari- 
amne. I can still hear the long pace and 
stride overhead. 

Lest her type seem too strange, perhaps, it 
was explained to us, what Plato explained long 
ago, that a poet is rapt wholly out of himself 
and is as one possessed of the gods. 

Then, too, which brought her nearer to our 
sympathies, my mother conveyed to us the 
more homely knowledge that Mrs. Rankin 
had had much unhappiness in her life; some 
Herod of her own, I believe. This secured to 
her our more willing respect and laid on us 
more than the ordinary obligation of courtesy. 
This virtue on our part was obliged to be its 
own reward , for there was no other that I can 
recall. 

These people, you will note, were not bound 
to us by ties of blood. They were rather rela- 
tions, rich or poor relations, of the spirit. I am 
bound also to tell of other guests than these: 
of those who by virtue of tradition and blood 
we more wontedly call "our own"; men and 
152 



Relations of the Spirit 

women of my mother's and father's families; 
aunts and uncles and "relatives," as we say. 

But before I pass on to these, there is need 
to mention one more, at least, of the relations 
of the spirit — that one to me most memor- 
able of them all; the young dramatist-poet, 
with his flying tie and his heavy hair, to whose 
romantic name — Eugene Ashton — I would 
how gladly have prefixed the title "Cousin" 
had I but been entitled to it; who was never- 
theless cousin-german to the spirit of me, or 
closer still, a kind of brother-of -dreams. He 
had been into distant countries of the soul — 
that was clear by a far-away look in his eyes. 
I used to sit wordless and well-behaved in his 
presence, but I slipped my soul's hand in his, 
very friendly, the while; I wandered far with 
him into realms of fancy, and counted his ap- 
proval and the merest glance he gave me as 
very nearly the most desirable thing I could 
attain to. 

I can see him still, and those gray eyes of 
his, as young as the young moon and as many 
centuries old; I can still hear his very noble 
voice, reciting from time to time, as he was 
wont to do, some of his own verses. Or I can 
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Guests 

see him leaning forward, his gracious body 
bending into the firelight, to talk over with 
my sympathetic mother his plans for recog- 
nition and fame. 

How little we guessed that his life was even 
then near to its setting! When one sees the 
morning star in the dawn, or Hesper in the 
twilight, hanging limpid, golden, one does not 
wonder will its glory be long or short ; so much 
it holds one with its immortal loveliness, that 
little thought is given to the near-by day, or 
the night which shall quench it. 

The other stars. Miss Lou Brooks, Mrs. 
Rankin, and the rest, shone long and high in 
the firmament of my childhood; but the mel- 
low light of the gifts of Eugene Ashton, like 
the more splendid Hesper, hung low, already 
low on the horizon. 

I shall not forget that morning we heard 
of his death. "Eugene Ashton is dead!" 
The news was not kept from us children. Yet 
I remember, too, that beyond the first sorrow 
and shock of such news lay a pardonable 
pride. He had loved our home; he had found 
comfort and rest of spirit there. I could still 
see his gray eyes looking into the firelight, 
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Kith and Kin 

and the bend of his gracious body, every inch 
of him a poet. There, with us, he had dared to 
be his best and had shared his gifts; his per- 
sonaUty had lighted up those very rooms and 
his voice had sounded in them there where 
still my daily lot was cast. He had been our 
guest — to me the most memorable of them 
all. And now he was gone. Where? A kind 
of glory followed the thought. He was gone 
down over the rim of the horizon of life to the 
land of Death, as splendid there as here. We 
had lost him, whereas he, you see, had only 
lost us. It was our lives that were darkened, 
not his. It was on our lives, not on his, that 
the night fell. So he also, having been as a 
"morning star among the living," now, having 

died, was 

... as Hesperus giving 
New splendor to the dead. 

II 

KITH AND KIN 

So far, in mentioning the many guests who 

frequented the old home of my childhood, I 

have named only such as were relations of the 

spirit. Often these seemed to me more truly 

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Guests 

my kindred than those whose kinship was 
based upon ties of blood. Yet, as my memory 
brings before me those men and women of my 
mother's and father's famiUes, I find myself 
aware that the bonds of blood are strong, 
strong. 

These came bearing valid claim of right and 
title; these were not to be gainsaid or denied; 
these were accompanied by silent, but how 
indisputable, witnesses of feature and form. 
Whether I liked them or not, these were "my 
own." 

But their chief power over me lay in this — 
that they linked my life openly to all that of 
the past which I could call mine. The older 
of them, who sometimes laid their hands on 
my head, touched with the other hand, as it 
were, the generation already gone. They still 
carried vivid memories of the dead in their 
hearts; spoke familiar words of them; or, per- 
haps, wore delicate pictures of them still in 
lockets at their throats. The invisible past 
was theirs visibly. 

The Greeks, that people of sound ideals and 
of incomparable taste for living, did not con- 
sent to or admit of the departure of the older 
156 



Kith and Kin 

generation. To the invisible hands of the 
lares and penates was delivered the sacredness 
of the house itself. The spirits of the "de- 
parted" commemorated its lintels, kept clean 
and bright the fires of the hearth, guarded the 
home from evil if so might be, and gathered 
into a sweet influence those traits and charac- 
teristics and deeds long gone in the flesh and 
surviving in the spirit in some fine aroma of 
living. 

It was, I believe, somewhat in the manner 
of the lares familiares that the clan of our 
older "blood-kin," both those of a past and 
those of a very nearly past generation, added 
meaning to that old home of my childhood. 

My great-aunts and great-uncles brought 
with them the spirits of ancestors, were, in a 
sense, abodes of ancestors themselves. An 
older generation looked out of their eyes; the 
spirits of men and women long gone still lin- 
gered with them. It lent a dignity to life. 

We children stood aside while they passed 
by in front of us. We saw them served at table 
and elsewhere to the best of everything. To 
them, too, as to the lares, were given the first 
and best portions of viands. We listened to 
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Guests 

them as though to oracles speaking. It was for 
us to allow the rivers of their broader wisdom 
to flow undisturbed by that kind of stone- 
throwing, pebble-skipping curiosity so notice- 
able in the average liberated child of to-day. 
Into their fine flowing streams of narrative we 
flung no big or little stones of our questions or 
our egotism. Their talk rippled on or flowed 
stately. 

"We were under full canvas," — I can see 
the fine-featured old gentleman yet, — "we 
were in a zone of tempests, sailing round the 
Horn" — a wave of the hand here, and a 
pause. 

What is "full canvas"? What is a "zone"? 
What is "Horn"? Indeed, we did not know. 
Be sure we did not interrupt the narrator to 
ask — not more than the audience arrests the 
ghost in "Hamlet" for exact definitions when 
it mouths out the sorrowful hollow words, 
"unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled." 

The words defined themselves well enough 
for all practical and spiritual purposes. The 
mere sound of them was much, and the man- 
ner of saying them was much more. We got 
no definitions of "full canvas," "zone," or 
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Kith and Kin 

"Horn," for future reference; but what we 
did get was a present sense of some of the 
great allied human experiences — the un- 
pitying power of the sea, the dread of a soul 
brought face to face with shipwreck and death, 
the quick awful moving of the "imminent 
hand of God," the cry of a coward, the fierce 
bravery of a brave man ready to fling life away 
for the sake of his fellows; then, the sense of a 
great deliverance and what we take to be the 
mercy of God. And beyond all these, for good 
measure, pressed down and running over, we 
had added unto us additional respect for those 
older and more experienced than ourselves, 
and the sense of a fine tale told tellingly. 

But I would not have you suppose that I 
found all the old ladies and all the old gentle- 
men delightful. Some of them I disliked and 
wished gone. A sense of justice compels me to 
believe, however, — putting aside all question 
as to whether they charmed or disappointed 
us, and considering them only as purely edu- 
cative mediums, — that these visitors of an 
older generation are not surpassed, indeed, 
are rarely equaled, by any theory or prac- 
tice of modern pedagogy. 
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Guests 

If Miss Lou Brooks and Eugene Ashton and 
Dr. Highway taught us much of foreign lands 
and strange worlds and spiritual astronomies; 
if they instructed me besides in the poetry 
and romance of life, these others gave me a 
knowledge and love and understanding of 
other times, other manners; they were a kind 
of incarnate treatises in history and ethics, 
philosophy, and comparative philology. 

What a lesson in history and manners was 
my great-aunt Sarah for instance! 

She was tall and stately, a kind of reproof 
to the shallowness of later days. There was 
about her the refinement and delicacy of a 
rare old vase. She had been young once ; this 
my reason told me, for, in her home, a large 
stone house called "Scarlet Oaks," hung a 
very beautiful portrait of her, a delicate, very 
young, translucent face, rising above the 
shimmering satin of a low-cut wedding gown. 
But for this I should have taken her to have 
been always old, in the sense, I mean, in which 
the piping forms of youth, the "brede of 
marble men and maidens," on Keats's Gre- 
cian urn are "forever young, forever fair." 
There was such a finality and finish about her, 
1 60 



Kith and Kin 

like something arrested in its perfection; such 
achievement, such delicate completeness, it 
seemed, as could not change! It appeared 
that, when old age should waste our own gen- 
eration, that delicate loveliness of her would 
remain untouched. She seemed already to 
live above, to survive, what was perishable 
and trivial in her own day and ours. 

She affected cashmere shawls and cameos, 
and wore long and very elaborate mitts, and 
was always spoken of as "delicate." "Aunt 
Sarah is very delicate." That, indeed, she was ! 

We all waited upon my aunt Sarah, from the 
greatest to the least. She was very fond of my 
father, and to hear her address him as "Wil- 
liam," and treat him with the condescension 
one gives to a child, — he who had iron-gray 
hair, — and to see his eager and affectionate 
and wholly respectful response, was to see time 
flow back. 

My great-aunt had two brothers, my uncle 
Hays and my uncle William, who still wore 
great pointed collars, and black stocks that 
wound around the throat several times, and 
broadcloth coats. But my great-uncles, un- 
like my great-aunt, seemed passing by. There 

12 i6i 



Guests 

was in their somewhat careful, sometimes 
feeble step a suggestion of treaty and capitu- 
lation, and from time to time, in their glance 
or actions, the pathos of childlikeness so much 
more frequent in the old of that sex than of the 
other. 

Such types were rare, even in my day. There 
were only a few, a very few such men and wo- 
men left then, guests of a twice older gener- 
ation, visiting still, with a kind of retained 
graciousness, in the house of life from which 
they were soon finally to depart. By an en- 
viable fate some six or eight of these men and 
women belonged to me. An air of grandeur 
came to the house with them as with the com- 
ing of the gods and goddesses in the old days; 
the human dwellings expanded, and the lintels 
grew tall. 

You can guess, perhaps, whether we chil- 
dren ventured a word! Glory enough to be 
permitted to come as silent as mice to supper, 
while they were there ! 

Yet I would not be misleading. Even those 

of a twice older generation were by no means 

inevitably stately and imposing. History is 

not given over entirely to kings and queens. 

162 



Kith and Kin 

There was, for instance, my great-aunt Hen- 
rietta, of the "other side of the house." She 
was a wholly different type. She was little. 
She wore three puffs at either side of her face. 
These were held in place by little gray combs. 
She knew everybody's affairs, and her chief 
delight was in recounting them. She was a 
living chronicle, an accurate, if inglorious, 
historian; an intimate and personal account, 
with a mind for little happenings and a prodi- 
gious memory for events; a sort of Pepys in 
petticoats and neckerchief. 

She was the oldest survivor of my mother's 
people. The family tree was in her keeping. 
But she cared little enough to dig about its 
deep roots. She took no delight, apparently in 
the dignity of its stem, or pride in the wide 
spread of its branches. Her entire pleasure, 
rather, was in the twittering and whispering of 
its leaves. There was something bird-like and 
flitting in her character, and she gossiped like 
a chaffinch. 

In her flowed together the great strains on 

my mother's side, Spencer and Halsted, names 

to conjure with. She had, certainly, not less 

to be stately about than my great-aunt Sarah. 

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Guests 

She had plenty of ancestors to be proud of, 
and for a touch of romance, had danced the 
minuet with Lafayette, when she was a slip of a 
girl and he a guest in her grandfather's house; 
but she never appeared in the least proud of 
her people, only unfailingly entertained by 
them. 

It was at an early age that I resolved to 
model my life after my aunt Sarah rather than 
after my aunt Henrietta; yet recalling my 
aunt Henrietta's memorable characteristics, 
and that about Lafayette, and the delightful 
side-puffs, and her searching comments on 
humanity, I am willing to admit that she 
was perhaps the more vivid lesson of the 
two. And if one counts the lasting distaste 
for gossip which I acquired by being obliged to 
listen respectfully, hours at a time, it seemed, 
while she continued to profess her little as- 
tonishments and "you-don't-say-so's!" to my 
mother, with the best end of her sentences 
always finished, inaudible to me, behind her 
fan, I am even prone to believe her to have 
been the more influential and educative of the 
two. 

In those days, those days when visits were 
164 



Kith and Kin 

long and frequent, the bond of kinship was 
firmly established, and family characteristics 
were strong and vivid.' These were Halsteds, 
Spencers, Hamiltons, Ogdens, Portors, and not 
to be mistaken, any more than you mistake 
now your reader for your speller, your history 
for your geography. 

It seemed, it is true, that they were there 
but to visit; but how much were they there, 
though how little were they aware of it, to 
teach, to enlighten, to admonish! With them 
came the Halsted or Spencer or Portor imperi- 
ousness or graciousness or brains ; the Halsted 
eyes, which were beautiful, and the Halsted 
tempers, which were not; with them came 
those obstinate egotisms, those devotions and 
ideals, those headstrong weaknesses, those 
gentle fortitudes which, strong in themselves, 
survived vividly from generation to genera- 
tion. 

My aunt Henrietta, my aunt Sarah and the 
rest, it was plain to be seen, were the earthly 
abodes of strong antecedent family spirits; 
and now, these bodily abodes doomed to de- 
cay, had not those spirits, strong and nimble, 
already begun to frequent the available lives 
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Guests 

of the younger generation, resolved on living 
yet in the day-lighted world, and visiting still 
the glimpses of the moon; hopeful, perhaps, 
in the younger generation, to correct some old 
folly; or willful, and determined, it might be, 
to pursue in some younger life the old fatality 
and mistakes? 

This was what it meant, this and not less, 
when, often a little wistfully, the passing gen- 
eration remarked certain likenesses. "Mary, 
how much she is getting to be like William!" 
or, "Do you know, she reminds me of her 
great-grandmother Ferguson"; or, "She has 
the Portor eyes"; and sometimes, cryptically, 
so that I might not guess too clearly what it 
meant, "Very like the Halsteds." 

All those things were, I believe, far more 
influential and educative than the unthink- 
ing will admit. They gave me much food for 
thought. They roused in me commendable 
emotions, or salutary dismays. Might I some 
day be like my aunt Sarah? Was I really like 
my father? Could I worthily be classed with 
these others? And traits not to be proud of — 
was I in danger from these? So cautions and 
hopes and worthinesses grew up in me under 
i66 



Kith and Kin 

the fine influence of what might be called 
a study in "Comparative Characteristics." 
There is not alone a dignity, but a tenderness 
as well, lent to life by such a study of former 
and passing generations. The results of living 
much of my childhood in the presence of the 
past, serving tea to it, offering it the required 
courtesies, putting footstools under its feet, 
were, I believe, a certain abiding reverence 
for human nobility, and a pity for human 
faults and weaknesses, and more, a desire and 
hope for nobility in myself, and a haunting 
dread that some family weakness might reap- 
pear in me; and these, as valuable assets to 
education, I would not rank below the dates of 
the battles of Crecy and Poitiers, and the siege 
of Paris — none of which dates, though I once 
learned them carefully, have remained with me. 
There is not space to tell of that nearer con- 
stellation of warm and bright stars, guests 
who were my mother's and father's intimate 
friends and contemporaries. Even if there 
were nothing else to recommend them, these 
were men and women who had lived through 
the Civil War in their prime. To sit on the 
knee of my ex-soldier uncle, and know that 
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Guests 

where my head leaned he carried in his breast- 
pocket a little Testament, with a bullet-hole 
in it but not quite through it — the Testament 
having saved his life and stopped the bullet 
from reaching his heart ; and to sit on the knee 
of another uncle, who actually carried a bullet 
from Antietam about in his body, yes, and for 
all that, was the very gayest of the gay — 
these experiences were spelling-books of a 
higher order and readings in life not to be 
looked down on. 

There were other uncles, who visited the 
house only in tradition, but were entertained 
there how warmly of my eager fancy, — their 
adventurous lives having ended before mine 
began, — who were memorable lessons in dar- 
ing, in courtesy, and in spirit! 

There was my uncle Robert, for instance, 
who, to escape, for his part, from my Chancellor 
grandfather's stern requirement that all of 
his seven sons should study law, ran away 
and went before the mast at eighteen, and at 
twenty-one came sailing home again, master 
of his own vessel. 

She was called the Griffin. Ah, the Griffin! 
the Griffin! Though I never set foot upon her 
i68 



Kith and Kin 

deck, how well I knew her, masts, spars, can- 
vas, tar, and timber! How often I had stood 
in dreams, a little figure at the prow, my skirts 
and hair blown back by the wind, while we 
sailed the seas, she and I and her gallant crew, 
under the wise direction of my sailor uncle! 
How often had we sought and found, across 
the pathless ways, those places, vague, vague 
and far away, but known and endeared to me by 
the wonder and the romance of their names — 
China and Celebes, Madagascar and Gibral- 
tar, the Azores and Canaries and Shetlands, 
Hebrides, Bermudas and the Spice Islands, 
Ceylon and the Andamans, Marseilles and 
Archangel and Valparaiso! How possible all 
of them were, how sure of access, without 
regard to limiting geography! Let but the 
Griffin weigh her anchor, and her sails be set! 
How far ! how far ! 

Never mind that the Griffin's master was 
dead and buried in the sea he loved, before 
I was born! I contrived to live above these 
facts, as I did above geography. Could it be 
possible, do you think, that this my best- 
loved uncle did not know me when I knew 
him so well? Was I not, somehow and not- 
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Guests 

withstanding, one of his close kith and kin, 
on whom he looked fondly? His favorite niece, 
perhaps with a spirit of adventure to match 
his own? 

There were other uncles besides, with lives 
full as romantic. I mention only this one, 
because I loved him best. 

There was, further, my mother's youngest 
sister, who was better than any legend. I 
would rather have inherited, as I did then, 
that love-story of hers, than very considerable 
worldly riches. 

Another of my mother's sisters was mistress 
of a home on Fifth Avenue and of a very lovely 
country place on the Hudson. She had maids 
at every hand to wait upon her, and footmen 
whose eyes looked straight ahead of them, and 
who wore cockades in their hats. I liked her 
for herself : her beauty and her spirit and com- 
mandingness always stirred me, and she liked 
and approved of me, besides. Moreover, — 
let me be frank, — I liked her too, in those 
days, for the footmen as well. One of my sis- 
ters had visited her for nine months, and had, 
on her return, entirely revolutionized all my 
ideas of the world. 

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Kith and Kin 

But that, rather, which confirmed and stab- 
lished me and my ideals as on a rock, was the 
love-story of my youngest aunt. 

She and her husband had only the most 
moderate means. They lived in what I like 
now to believe must have been a rose-covered 
cottage. But oh, the love of them! She had a 
mass of wonderful hair which it seems he loved 
to unpin at night, to see it fall at either side of 
her lovely face, down to her knees and beyond; 
and a tiny foot, whose slipper he would allow 
no one but himself to put on. All reports of 
every member of the family agreed : these were 
a pair of perfect lovers; like " Rose in Bloom " 
and ''Ansal Wajoud"; no harsh word was 
ever spoken between them; they lived wholly 
for each other, in a blissful world apart, rich 
in their own manner; where neither poverty, 
nor distress, nor discord could find them; and 
where no hand could ever fall upon the latch 
to bring them sorrow — save only one. 

That hand fell — the hand of him gently 
termed by Scheherazade and other tale-tellers 
of the East, "The Terminator of Delights, and 
Separator of Companions." 

She came to be with us the winter that she 
171 



Guests 

was widowed. It was thought the change of 
air, and perhaps the brightness of our house- 
hold, might be of some Uttle help. We chil- 
dren were admonished to be very gentle — 
not to be noisy. Superflous precaution! She 
was to me sacred! 

She used to walk up and down the upper 
veranda, taking the air slenderly, a light shawl 
about her shoulders, her tiny foot pausing now 
and then for greater steadiness, when the wind 
swayed her frail body too rudely. I have known 
many faces since then ; I never knew one with 
a lovelier look. Heartbroken though she was, 
the depth of her love was daily attested, for 
there never came complaint or bitter word 
across her lips; and you went to her, with- 
out question, for quiet and comfort, as to a 
sanctuary. 

At first, it seems, she had been pitifully re- 
bellious, had longed and prayed to die (we 
children knew these facts); but, having been 
denied so much as this, she rose delicately, and 
lived on worthy of him, binding and unbinding 
her hair, fastening her little slippers anew for 
the daily road and routine of life. Sometimes, 
with tactful or tactless devotion (I do not know 
172 



Kith and K 



n 



to this day which) , I would offer to fasten them 
for her ; and she would smile and let me do it, 
and usually kissed me afterward. 

There were years and years when I never 
saw her. She grew more frail, I am told, and 
her cheek withered ; but to me she was always 
incomparable, and always ''Rose-in-Bloom"; 
and like Rose-in-Bloom, looking always to one 
thing only — reunion with her beloved. 

"Will fortune, after separation and distance, 
grant me union with my beloved?" sighs the 
lover of Rose-in-Bloom. "Close the book of 
estrangement and efface my trouble? Shall 
my beloved be my cup-companion once more? 
Where is Rose-in-Bloom, O King of the Age?" 

It might have been her lover who so ques- 
tioned a mightier king, while she waited far 
from him, there even in our very house. And 
the reply of the king in the story would still 
have been fitting: "By Allah, ye are two sin- 
cere lovers; and in the heaven of beauty two 
shining stars, and your case is wonderful and 
your affair extraordinary." 

It were indeed impossible to explain all that 
these, the vivid lives of my own, meant to me, 
173 



Guests 

and what effect they had on what I like to call 
my education — how much indeed they were 
my education. 

It is usually assumed that, the sooner we 
get at books, the sooner we shall become edu- 
cated. I think it a pale assumption. The order 
might more happily be reversed. I am con- 
vinced that it was mainly by my reading of 
these men and women, with whom the world 
of my childhood was peopled and whom the 
gracious habit of visiting brought within my 
ken, that I came later to recognize and enjoy 
the best authors and the best literature. I had 
known Lear and Othello and Hamlet in my 
own circle, though without Shakespearean 
dramatization or language. I have already 
told you how well I knew " Rose-in-Bloom," 
so much better than the "Arabian Nights" 
could ever tell me of her. "The poet's eye in a 
fine frenzy rolling" was familiar enough to me. 
I had had it rolled on me by the author of 
"Herod and Mariamne." I was continually 
recognizing in books fragments of life, but 
glorified by the art of phrase or symbol. When 
I came one day upon the incomparable scene 
in Capulet's orchard, and those lines, — 
174 



Kith and Kin 

"By yonder blessed moon I swear, 
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops," 

was I, do you think, a stranger to it? Had I 
not in real life heard Miss Lou Brooks sing 
with a full heart and a quivering voice, — 
"The stars shine o'er his pathway ! " 

It will, without doubt, be objected that my 
childhood was an exceptional one, even for 
my day ; that the average child of the present 
would certainly have no such characters and 
types from which to draw knowledge. But 
this is, I am sure, a false premise. Humanity 
is a very ancient stuff, and human beings are 
to be found to-day quite as interesting and 
vivid as ever human beings were. But there 
lacks to the modern child the quiet oppor- 
tunity for knowing and studying humanity 
at first-hand. In place of long and comfortable 
and constant visits, we have a kind of motion- 
picture hospitality soon over, a film on a roll 
soon spun out; and instead of life with its 
slower actions and reactions, a startling mere 
picture of life flashing by. 

A short time ago I watched a party of mar- 
ried people and children receive an automobile- 
ful of guests at a country house. The guests 
175 



Guests 

remained something over twelve hours, which 
is a long visit in these days. 

When they came, it was explained by them 
how many miles they had come that day and 
over what roads. An hour was now devoted to 
getting the dust off and to a change of clothes. 
After this there was much chatter among host 
and guests, talk of mutual friends, and much 
detail as to journeying; what roads had been 
found good, what ones uncomfortable for 
speeding, with a comparing of road-maps 
among the men. Then there was luncheon; 
after that, siestas; after these, a spin to the polo 
grounds in the host's *' auto" ; after this, tea on 
the country-club veranda, and another spin 
home. Another half -hour was now again given 
to the removal of dust, then an hour to an ex- 
ceptionally well-served supper; more chatter, 
with rather high laughter; then the summon- 
ing of the original "auto"; good-byes, some 
waving of hands, a little preliminary chugging 
of the machine; then a speeding away, a van- 
ished thing. Gone in a flash! A clean sheet 
once more ! The moving-picture visit was over ; 
the host and hostess returned to the chairs on 
their own veranda; the handsome, long-legged 
176 



Kith and Kin 

bronzed children looked bored; and the lares 
and penates inside, if there were any, shivered, 
I am sure, with what "freezings" in the midst 
of "old December's bareness everywhere." 

"And yet this time removed was summer's 
time." There were in that flashing speeding 
automobile six people : there was an old gentle- 
man (very trig and alert) who had hunted 
tigers in India and had buried three wives; 
there was a woman who was one of the most 
proud and vain women in the world, as well 
as one of the most beautiful ; there was a man 
who had carried through a great panic in Wall 
Street, and who wore an invisible halo of pray- 
ers of widows and orphans ; there was a middle- 
aged woman with a broken heart, whose lover 
had been buried at sea ; there was a fresh-look- 
ing young girl chained to the rock of modern 
conventions, and a square- jawed handsome 
young Perseus, who was in love with her and 
determined to rescue her and carry her away 
to dwell with poverty and himself on a claim 
in eastern Idaho. 

Flash, flash! They are moving pictures, 
they are gone! What might they not have 
been, what might they not have contributed, 
13 177 



Guests 

very especially to the host's children, in the 
way of lessons and knowledge and education, 
had they remained long enough to be guests! 
What? Education? But the children all go to 
school, and to the best to be had ; and the little 
one there is just starting in under the Montes- 
sori method. You should see how amazingly, 
from fifty-seven varieties, she can select and 
grade the different shades and colors. 

Madame Montessori recommends that chil- 
dren be under the care of a "directress" (note 
the name) in the "Houses of Childhood," each 
day, the day to begin at eight and to last until 
six, in a schoolroom where the Montessori 
"method" is practised by means, mainly, of 
the "didactic material"! The thing revolts 
me. I do not say, "What time for arithmetic 
and geography, and the sterner realities of 
schooling?" No, nor do I complain as does 
Sir Walter Scott when he touches on Waver- 
ley's education, you remember, that "the his- 
tory of England is now reduced to a game at 
cards." I say to myself more solemnly, "But 
what time is left for life? What time for 
guests?" 

They have a great care of children's edu- 
178 



Kith and Kin 

cation nowadays. We were neglected to a 
higher learning and abandoned to a larger fate. 
There were guests coming ! We made off to don 
our best dresses and behaviors. We hoped to 
be worthy the gracious occasion. We meant to 
try. Life was at the door. 

It was not mere shrewdness in St. Paul, 
surely, when he recommended the Romans so 
earnestly to be "given to hospitality"; but a 
wistfulness as well, and a certain longing for a 
high education to be given unto them; and it 
was his correspondents' welfare he had in 
mind, you remember, rather than the welfare 
of their guests, when he bade the Hebrews 
that they "be not forgetful to entertain stran- 
gers"; for — now note carefully the sequel — 
"for thereby some have entertained angels un- 
awares." 

I have an old friend who is on his way, I am 
told by those in authority, to be one of our 
great modern psychologists. He gives anxious 
thought to the education of his children. 
Lately, he approached me seriously in the mat- 
ter of his boy's educational needs. Would I 
talk them over with him? He wished to con- 
sult me. I looked for a careful discussion of 
179 



Guests 

"methods," and was ready with all my argu- 
ments concerning the Montessori teachings. 
Instead, he inquired, "Now when will you 
come and visit us? a real visit, I mean? That 
is what I wanted to ask you. It is with that 
that I am most concerned. That is exactly 
what Jack needs." 

I am needed as a guest in their house, for 
the sake of the children ! My heart rises at the 
thought ! Cheered, I seem to see ahead, clearly, 
a time when, if we do not provide them with 
guests, we shall think that we have shame- 
fully neglected our children's education ; when 
we will no more deny them visitors, than we 
would now neglect to have them taught to read. 

To love life for ourselves and others; to be 
forever interested in it; to be loyal to it, and 
that down to the grave ; to dwell helpfully and 
appreciatively with one's kind ; to understand 
others as generously as is possible to faulty 
human nature, and to make ourselves under- 
stood as much as is consistent with courtesy; 
these are, I take it, the fine flower of culture; 
here is all that I would dare call education, or 
presume to think of permanent importance. 

And by no means, I feel sure, can youth be 
1 80 



Kith and Kin 

led to all this so readily, so happily, so ef- 
fectually, as by means of the age-old virtue of 
hospitality. These things are things which 
guests bring with them, knowing it not, and 
bestow on those who are not aware of the be- 
stowal. 

And our most advanced ideal, that of "uni- 
versal brotherhood" and a ''federation of the 
world" — what is this, I ask you, but a glad 
sharing of life in a society to which all will be 
welcome, with bread and wine and greeting de- 
nied to none, and guest and host fulfilling an 
equal obligation? 

This is the old manner of entertaining, and 
— I ask your patience — it is God's manner, 
not less. The gentle sympathy, the unfailing 
hospitality of my mother, — how gentle and 
understanding she was of all types which fre- 
quented the old house ! — her patience and 
hospitality had in them, I like to think, some 
resemblance to that larger patience of Him in 
whose House of Life we do but for a time visit, 
some of us how gayly, how romantically, some 
how fretfully and inconsiderately, lingering 
past our time; some contributing but idle 
gossip; some lending to the hearth-fires the 
i8i 



Guests 

glow of poetic dreams; some adding truth or 
dignity of our own; some possessed of foibles 
and accomplished in failures ; some shining with 
hopes of final successes that shall never be 
ours. Yet all of us, by the grace of God, and 
God be thanked, even so, adding somewhat 
to the meaning of life, edifying when we least 
know it, teaching when we are wholly unaware ; 
helpful, instructive, even in our blunders, 
profiting others by the often profitless lessons 
and fables of our lives; enlightening when we 
are most ignorant of so doing, and even when 
our own lives are darkened. In a word, guests; 
and what is of even sweeter import, all of us 
understood, condoned, valued, pitied, loved, 
by the Master of the House; welcomed by his 
world that has long looked for our coming; 
served by his servants; waited upon by wind 
and wave and those others who do his bidding ; 
afforded the bread of life to eat, given the wine 
of life to drink; warmed by the shining, wel- 
coming sun; lighted by no less candles than 
the stars; and with rest and peace, and a bed 
at last for every one. 



THE DISAPPOINTMENTS AND 

VICISSITUDES OF MICE 

I 

There is, I am persuaded, a tendency in 
many of us to reckon too absorbedly our own 
difficulties and to give but scant regard to the 
difficulties of others. This I have observed fre- 
quently, not only in our associations with those 
of our own kind, but very especially in our re- 
lations with creatures that we assume to be of 
a lower order than ourselves. 

I believe my own opportunity for observing 
the difficulties and disappointments of certain 
members of the animal kingdom to have been 
somewhat exceptional. It first came to me by 
way of residence in a very delightful house in 
the country, in which it was my privilege to 
live. It is an old house, as age goes in America, 
eighty or more years having passed over the 
oldest of its low gables. Before we came to it, 
the owner had not lived in it for many years. 
People had camped there from time to time; 
it had served during one summer as sanctuary 
183 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

to some episcopal nuns, who set up a chapel in 
one of its twenty-two rooms, and tinkled mat- 
ins and vespers in and out of its twilit cham- 
bers; but they remained a short two months 
only and then went on again, they and their 
chanted services, leaving it voiceless and ten- 
antless — tenantless, that is, as to human 
kind. 

When we came to it there were many prob- 
lems, difficult enough, certainly, to be met 
before the beautiful old rooms of pleasing and 
aristocratical proportions could be made com- 
fortable and livable. But I know now that I 
reckoned these problems far too curiously, 
and with too scant regard for the far greater 
difficulties that our advent must have put 
upon all the shy creature-folk who had up to 
that time found the old place convenient and 
habitable enough. 

In front of the house a wide brook brawls, 
or pauses in little pools, to meditate under the 
hazel light of the birches and maples of a most 
lovely woodland. Into this woodland the long 
veranda, running the length of the house, faces 
directly. It is but a step — say, rather, the 
mere dip of a wing — from the branches of the 
184 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

trees to the more sheltered safety of those cor- 
nices and crevices of pillar and window-frame 
where nests may be built so commodiously, 
away from storm and uncertainty of many 
kinds; so, too, it is but a step, or let us say a 
mere flying-squirrel-leap, from the drooping 
wood branches to the mossy veranda roof, and 
thence a swift squirrel-run, of no distance at 
all, along the varied eaves, and under them 
where secret openings ofTer, and then but a 
flash of four-footed speed, to the inviting safety 
and quiet of the old rafter attic — an ideal 
place to raise baby squirrels. 

When we arrived that day, the house was 
occupied, at its edges and corners, and even 
between its closed attic shutters, by birds of 
every householding and houseloving variety; 
and in between its many walls, and in its upper 
rooms and closets and air-chambers and low, 
long attic, by squirrels and chipmunks; and 
here, there, and everywhere, as we learned 
later, in all manner of unobservable but plain- 
ly audible places, by mice. 

At the time I was not aware of the complete- 
ness of this occupancy ; but looking back now 
with full knowledge, I have a sense of shame 
185 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

and crudeness as I think what our coming 
must have meant to all those many denizens of 
that long, rambling, quiet old mansion. I had 
then, it must be remembered, not a thought of 
them. We were reckoning so absorbedly all 
our own difficulties and discomforts of mov- 
ing attendant on our arrival, that we gave 
not so much as a thought to their calamities 
of withdrawal. 

The birds were the first to go. I remember 
the frightened dart of one of them close to my 
face when I first stepped from the front hall 
on to the veranda. Such a frightened whirr and 
clipping and cutting of the air to get through 
it and away, as if a panic had seized her. And 
another on the branches just beyond the ver- 
anda, on her way, no doubt, back to her nest 
on the window-casing, where now she dared 
not alight. Such incredulous flitting from 
branch to branch, such twitching of tail and 
wings, such anxious twitterings and turnings 
of the head, such bird exclamations! Then she 
spread her wings and flew away, no doubt to 
circulate the news. What Huns and Vandals 
had entered on her possessions and threatened 
the country of her safety! 
i86 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

I think the first week, certainly the second, 
at most, saw all the birds gone. The squirrels 
and chipmunks, too, though they stayed on a 
trifle later, were not long in departing. There 
were councils and hurried scamperings, hushed 
pauses, and now and then — when I got an 
actual glimpse of one of them — an attitude 
of intent listening, a tiny paw held dangling 
in front of a visibly beating heart; then the 
quick, noiseless drop to all-fours, the drooped 
tail, the flash of speed; then the leap into leafy 
invisibility — only the branches left swaying, 
remembering. 

We had an Irish cook, who called all this 
tribe — red squirrels, gray squirrels, and chip- 
munks, — indiscriminately "the munks." 

"God bless us! Look at the munks, mum! 
How they do race and carry on!" 

She came to me the second morning, after 
what I take to have been a sleepless night. 
"Did you hear last night, mum? 'Twas a 
shame to any decent house. And but for its 
bein' here in this heathen country, at the back 
of God's field, and not a Christian locomotive 
to be had for miles, I 'd pack up and be gone 
before I 'd stand another night of their riotin' ! 
187 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

I can't stand the rakish things, mum." The 
last in a high, nervous key. 

"What is it you cannot stand?" 

"The munks, mum!" 

It was she, a devout daughter of the Church, 
who had said it. I made no amendment; I 
only, I am sorry to say, offered her as consola- 
tion this : — 

"Don't worry about them. They will not 
stay now we are here. They will find other 
homes for themselves." 

Yes, I said just that, and gave it to her for 
consolation. 

II 

So much for the birds and squirrels, those 
altogether shy denizens given to quick abdi- 
cation. But the mice, being, I suppose, of a 
somewhat more reasoning and philosophical 
order, more given to treaty and capitulation, 
remained, after I know not what cautious con- 
siderations and watchful consultations among 
themselves. That these must have been suffi- 
ciently serious, I am convinced, for we heard 
at first very little indeed of their doings; 
as if they intended to wait and study this 
i88 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

phenomenon of our usurpation before taking 
any risk with powers so unlikely and un- 
known. 

But as time passed, their attitude toward 
the heavens and their horoscope must have al- 
tered. Doubtless there was some hope that 
matters were not so bad as the old and experi- 
enced among them had prophesied. Appro- 
priately quiet in the day, in the night they 
began to dare, and to recover what was, I sup- 
pose, some of their erstwhile freedom, or old- 
time happiness. They began cautiously to 
come and go; to advance creepingly; to ex- 
plore; to inquire and pry; to examine and 
study; and I think, no doubt, to report. 

The usurpers, it seems, had a strange way of 
lying quiet at night (of all times!), and pur- 
suing their busy activities in the day, when 
all good mouse citizens were in bed and asleep ! 
Well, so far so good. Perhaps the mice set this 
down to a special providence. However that 
may be, it is certain that they acted on the 
intelligence; for at night, having now become 
well informed as to our habits, they began to 
come and go, if still a little cautiously, yet with 
more and more freedom. 
189 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

I used to lie awake listening to them. One 
would scurry across the floor wildly overhead, 
forget something, and run back for it. An- 
other, carrying a burden, would in fright or 
haste drop it, scamper away as if terrified (oh, 
good gracious!) and then would dare to go 
back for it, and roll it away soundingly into 
safety. I am inclined to think that a certain 
pleasure was attendant on these dangers, and 
that among them, as among ourselves, the 
brave were the gay ; for there were among them 
now — oh, bead-eyed, venturesome spirits! — 
certain delicate squeakings that had all the 
effect of laughter. I could have sworn their 
feet tittered ; there was — I do assure you I 
am speaking the truth — something giggling 
in their gait. 

They were not, I am sure, without their 
Colchases and Cassandras; but, despite these, 
they began ere long to have certain celebra- 
tions. Go to! Let old White-Whiskers, who 
foretold calamity, take himself off and lie 
with his nose on his paws! There are better 
things in the world than prudence ! 

Celebrations there certainly were, though of 
what exact kind I am unable to state; wed- 
190 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

dings, very likel}^; town meetings, it may be, 
with the ladies present and welcome; picnics, 
in all probability; and christenings, I lean to 
believe, at which I make little doubt they 
drank deliriously of dandelion wine. One 
must not demand too curiously where they 
got it. I really have no idea. I keep my own 
well corked. I only know that circumstantial 
evidence is strongly in favor of the belief that 
they had it, and that in large quantities. How 
else is it conceivable they could so far forget 
our presence and their own risk? For I heard 
them coming home late one night between the 
rafters, shortly before daw^n, in an openly 
riotous manner. Prudence they had flung to 
the winds. Their behavior was wholly ram- 
shackle and reckless. Such squeakings! such 
tumblings and titterings and scramblings as 
could only have occurred among those totally 
oblivious to all danger ! Such a drunken drop- 
ping of acorns and other picnic viands! with 
little shrieks from the ladies! Too evidently 
they had determined to eat and drink and be 
merry, let come what would. 

I could not help laughing myself with them, 
yet I sobered, too, at such recklessness on their 
191 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

part. This was no mere indiscretion; it was 
sheer folly. 

I have no way of knowing whether any 
Daniel rose to warn them. If so, he was not 
heeded. The feast went on uninterrupted. Or, 
it is possible, too, they had not the requisite 
education or conscience to enable them to 
read the moonlight on the rafter wall for writ- 
ing of an ominous character. 

When I wakened in the morning, not a 
sound or evidence. Like Bottom, it seemed to 
me that I had had a most rare vision, for day- 
light had laid a hushing and dispersing hand 
on them also. Then, suddenly, I knew it all 
for reality. Not a beady eye among them, of 
course, that was not closed now; in the day- 
time twilight of old rafters, all of them, with- 
out doubt, slept, dandelion deep, their noses 
and their whiskers on their tails. 

Meanwhile, time and events went forward. 
Miss Layng, a North-of-Ireland woman who 
kept house for us, while I attended to the work 
required of me in my study, appeared before 
me with a white and sleepless face. 

Miss Layng had ominous colored hair, which 
she heaped each morning in an exact manner 
192 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

above a face in which delicate health, gentle- 
ness, and unalterable determination were com- 
posite. She stood before me now, like an alle- 
gorical figure of Justice, or Commerce, or Law, 
bearing in one outheld hand a magenta 
"Dutchman's head" cheese. 

"You heard them?" 

She spoke with quiet severity. 

I looked inquiring, innocent. 

She disregarded this, as a person too much 
above a lie herself to recognize one. 

"I think we shall need six traps, at least. 
Cook says she will not stay unless they go. 
She says one ran across her face last night!" 

(Oh, the riotousness of them! More than I 
had suspected!) 

At this moment the cook herself appeared, 
far less allegorical, comfortingly real, a lemon- 
squeezer in one hand. 

"Oh, mum, I can't be saying exactly whether 
it did or not. Maybe it did, belike it did n't. 
But they do get me that nervous with what 
they might do!" 

"You can see from this," antiphonied Miss 
Layng, solemnly. 

She turned the Holland cheese toward me. 
14 193 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

In its side was eaten what could only be called 
a cavern. She stood there exhibiting it, elo- 
quent, without need of words. 

Meanwhile, my own mental processes were 
busy, delightedly. Of course! of course! Here 
was a revelation and an accounting! It was 
this, undoubtedly, that had been the occasion 
of so much merriment and wild celebration. 
And how altogether natural! For days they 
had been fearful, and oppressed with dark anx- 
iety. What harm might not such a race as 
ourselves bring them! Other powers had fled 
before us. They had remained ! But who dared 
tell the outcome? Dark prophecies! Sombre 
forebodings! Unthinkable possibilities! And 
then, — then, — when the dark-minded and 
old among them pointed out optimism as the 
sheerest folly, — then came this proof of un- 
looked-for benevolence! Age and pessimism 
received their due. Caution and timorousness 
were flung to the winds. Old wives and grand- 
fathers were flouted, and their cautiousness 
set down to sheer envy and crabbedness. 
The day and the victory were in the hands of 
the young, the optimistic, the full of faith! 
Come, ladies ; come gentlemen ! Pay no heed to 
194 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

these pessimistic aged people. Preserve your 
faith in Hfe! Here is good warrant! Quick! 
uncork the bottles! Bring the baskets along! 
This is a day for feasting, for feasting! Look 
upon this magenta miracle of benevolence, 
and be convinced. Life is kind! 

Where is a man with heart and imagination 
so dead who would not understand, by the 
light of all this, why the night had seen such 
celebration? How well understood, now, was 
the daring of the gentlemen, the almost hys- 
terical gayety of the ladies ! 

Meanwhile Miss Layng waited. 

" I thought I would get six traps, but wished 
to speak of it first, otherwise you might won- 
der to see so many on the bill at the end of the 
month." 

In this cryptic yet crystalline fashion the 
problem of their fate was presented to me. 
There was put before me a choice, a clear 
choice, between the proper maintaining of an 
honorable household, the retaining of a house- 
keeper and a cook with all that this implied 
as to my own comfort, and — a whole com- 
munity of I know not how many fathers, 
mothers, children, step-children, brothers, 
195 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

half-brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, first cou- 
sins once removed, prophets, sibyls, lawgivers. 

Need I say which I felt constrained to 
choose? 

Six were caught the first night. 

Ill 

Six the first night ! In the very midst of their 
rejoicings and the apparent favor of their di- 
vinity — six! What a subject for a rodent 
^schylus ! How they must have set themselves 
to ponder it! How and by what neglect or 
unintentional disrespect had they offended the 
gods, who but a while before had shone so 
kind! Six! And, as in the reapings of war 
among ourselves, these were bound to have 
been the best and most adventurous spirits. 
I paused to look at only one of them. What 
a sleek and likely fellow he was ! What a bead 
of an eye ! What a father of a family he would 
have made, nay, perhaps was! 

After that I asked Miss Layng to spare me 
all bulletins and statistics; but by the fre- 
quency with which I came across her in the 
halls, or just emerging from closets, holding 
far from her, between horrified fingers, a small 
196 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

magenta trap rigged with wires and a dangling 
tail, I knew the number was large. 

I knew, too, by signs other and quite as au- 
thentic. The riotous junketings had indeed 
ceased. The community was without doubt 
sobered, and, it may be, led to think of its sins, 
its gods having turned against it. There was 
less frolic and gladness in the world than there 
had been. 

I confess, all this seemed to me a loss, or, 
more exactly, a kind of waste. The wiser and 
the brooding East does not throw such things 
away. Are there not many folk in India, of 
tawny skin and gentle eye, who regard the 
humbler orders as sacred? There in that land 
are not the monkeys (and I cannot believe 
them to be a less destructive or garrulous race) 
welcome to the temples? There does not Kim's 
sacred bull go about and select the best vege- 
tables for himself? 

I was discontent with our order of things, 
not to say conscience-stricken, and thought 
much about it. How we patronize and humili- 
ate and rout and exterminate these humbler 
folk! With how marked an arrogance we deal 
with them! How we impose our morals upon 
197 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

them, and bid them live up to our laws or be 
gone! They must exist in the presence of a 
perpetual ultimatum. No court is held for 
their benefit. There is no appeal possible save 
to mouse-traps with their inevitable death- 
penalty. There is no more chance of getting 
their case correctly stated before us than be- 
fore the White Queen. Who ever listened to 
even their most able and eloquent attorney? 

"My lords," he begins, with nervous whis- 
kers, "the case of my client is one that especi- 
ally commends itself to human clemency. Six 
little ones at home, my lords, and not a mouth- 
ful to eat! If this, my lords, if this be not — " 

"Off with his head! Sentence first" (the 
inevitable sentence!), "verdict afterward!" 

So we behave ourselves atrociously toward 
these, who, though of a humbler order, are yet 
susceptible, I doubt not, of sensibilities and 
sorrows and enjoyments; we, who in turn are 
so ready to abuse our own order for their atroci- 
ties when we do not happen to be a party to 
them. 

These things are disturbing to philosophy 
and troubling to the heart. How shall we with 
a conscience justify ourselves in the eyes of the 
198 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

animal creation? Humbler folk than ourselves, 
yet I cannot think that mice suffer by a com- 
parison. I have attended to them with much 
speculative attention, and I have found them 
a peaceable people without malice. The worst 
offense that I have to record against them is 
the demolition of several fine books in my li- 
brary; but it was done (it is not fair to hide 
this testimony) with the high intent of pro- 
viding a comfortable nest for the birth and 
early tending of the tender young. As much 
cannot be said for the destruction of Louvain, 
for the shelling of Rheims. They have pur- 
loined my cheese and been sly as to my soap 
and tallow candles, but not, you will note, 
that they might grow disproportionately fat 
and sleek thereon ; no, nor for the sake of bank- 
ing these riches, to exchange them later for 
horseless carriages in which to loll lazily or to 
pursue madly some unwholesome excitement; 
no, nor yet to lay such things by in hoard and 
stores in such a manner as to make it difficult 
or impossible for others to have the same 
pleasure as themselves. No; they took only 
what hunger rendered legitimate, a few satis- 
fying nibbles at the candle, then leaving it 
199 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

free, with a fine democracy, for the next man 
to take whatever was his need. 

Where shall you find me a milUonaire, or 
even a moderately conscientious business man 
among us, with as generous and as democratic 
a tendency? We who are so sharp with them, 
so eager to give them the death-penalty, would 
we have thieved as little as they? Nor have I 
ever, for all my listenings, been able to hear 
any quarrelings or recriminations among them. 
Solicitous cautions, dangerous adventure, fro- 
lickings and gigglings and squeaking laugh- 
ter I have heard, but nothing to compare 
with our harshnesses, spoken and unspoken; 
nor do I believe them capable either of our 
sullenness or our spites. I have met, as have 
most of us, with days of such from honorable 
men and women, which I do not believe a 
mouse — of a so much lower order ! — would 
for a moment be capable of. 

In the face of uncertainties and disappoint- 
ments such as theirs, what would become, I 
wonder, of our philosophy? Yet they would 
appear to maintain their gentleness unspoiled. 
We who take offense so readily ; we who would 
boast if we forgave a man seven times seven ! 
200 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

They, it would appear from easily collected 
data, do, in all likelihood, forgive seven hun- 
dred times seventy, and make no ado about it 
at all. They seem always ready to try life anew, 
and to give you another chance to be generous. 

I was sitting once in the library of the old 
house, of which I have written, reading. Still- 
ness and the stars were out ; a fire burned on the 
hearth, for the night was cold. I read by the 
light of a lamp a book that I loved. At my 
feet slept Commodore, my collie, his pointed 
nose resting on his paws. On the rug by the 
fire was the old tortoise-shell cat. Lady Jane, 
a spoiled but endeared companion. Both had 
had their supper so bounteously that the dish 
of milk lay unemptied still on the hearth, and, 
like the Giant in the fairy tale, they slept 
"from repletion." 

They slept and I read, and for comfort of 
mind and body you might have gone far to 
find three so comfortable as we that night. 
And then presently I became aware of a little 
timorous shadow, that was not a shadow, 
after all, but a tiny, tiny mouse. It put up its 
nose and sniffed the air nor'-nor'-west, sou'- 
sou'-east. It tasted the possible danger with 

201 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

its whiskers. It tasted and made sure, deli- 
cately, like a connoisseur. Could the great ad- 
venture be risked? 

I can give you no idea by what sensitive 
soundings and testings and deliberations and 
speculations it at last crept into the flickering 
firelight. I wish I could convey to you the 
delicacy of its behavior: manners to make 
those of Commodore and Lady Jane (they with 
their sounding titles!) seem crude and greedy 
and plebeian. Its little pauses said, "May 
I?" Its delicate deliberations conveyed, "If 
I am troubling no one?" Its hesitations of- 
fered, "If I may be so bold?" And then, 
after these preliminaries, it took its place how 
politely on the brim of the flat dish of milk, 
and drank, and raised its head, and drank, 
paused and drank again, daintily. Once, I 
thought, it offered a courteous toast to me and 
my silence. 

Commodore and Lady Jane slept on! Oh, 
if they had known! Oh, the mews of disap- 
pointment and the terrible barkings and the 
Fi-fo-fum there would have been! But no, 
they slept on; and at last, having supped but 
lightly, the little mouse took itself away, car- 

202 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

rying with it neither money-bags nor mar- 
velous hen, nor golden harp. A true story and 
a fairy tale all in one, if you like — and with- 
out the questionable ethics of its more famous 
prototype. 

IV 

What do they make of life? Their stoicism, 
their gentleness, their never- jaded curiosity 
perpetually tempt my speculation. That they 
are a people of vicissitudes and disappoint- 
ments due largely to ourselves needs no ar- 
guing. What opinions have they of us? What 
effect have our behaviors on them? A con- 
sistently gentle people, they are treated with 
unvarying severity. What have they in lieu 
of logic to make life bearable? And what re- 
ward is there for their virtues? Or, are they 
too simple at heart, as yet, to ask for reward 
at all beyond the hope of a mere precarious 
existence? Is life as dear to them as that? 
And what, if any, in the way of religious spec- 
ulation of a crude and early order, might they 
be supposed to entertain? I would like to 
be delegated to investigate and report upon 
mouse mythology. 

203 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

I can hardly rid myself of the idea that in 
their present is, as it were, some dim glimmer- 
ing of our own past. They seem to me testing 
the world, as we ourselves must have done 
when we too were less established, when we 
also were in a position scarcely less precarious, 
eons before any written records were kept, 
long before man had learned to remember at 
will for the quick purposes of convenience and 
comparison — in a dim, dim foretime, when 
to us, in some early Caliban existence, the 
outward world was as Prospero, unaccount- 
able, and possessed of strange whimsies and 
quick with unwarrantable revenges. 

"When a tree," says Frazer, tracing in his 
"Golden Bough" the beginnings of mythol- 
ogy, "comes to be viewed no longer as a body 
of the tree spirit, but simply as its abode, 
which it can quit at pleasure, an important 
advance has been made in religious thought. 
Animism is passing into polytheism." 

I cannot help wondering from time to time, 
whimsically, whether those quiet denizens of 
that old house had made "an important ad- 
vance in religious thought"; was "animism," 
with them, "passing into polytheism"? Were 
204 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

mouse-traps deceptive and evil gods with 
terrible snapping jaws, or but the abodes of 
these evil deities? And for philosophy and 
metaphysic, what had they? In that dim at- 
tic world was this perhaps an entire people in 
its mythopoeic age, their gods descending and 
ascending miraculously, leaving a magenta 
cheese as incontrovertible evidence, or as un- 
accountably visiting them with swift and 
crafty destruction? 

I am inclined to think their world is a col- 
ored one, fertile in fables. It would not sur- 
prise me to find that a small wooden object, 
known to us of a different development as a 
mere "mouse-trap," is to them some Dis or 
Ahriman, a terrible deity of dark powers and 
multiple personalities. That there are other 
gods besides, — the great and awful cat, 
the less omnipresent but not less terrible ter- 
rier, — I am not disposed to doubt ; nor do I 
think they lack the shining ones also, as quiet 
as the others are full of movement, as con- 
ducive to life and well-being as the others 
to death and destruction — bright, effulgent 
ones of the godlike color of cheese, or silver 
sheen of tallow and paraffine; and back of all 
205 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

these, it may be, some elder deities, — our- 
selves, — the older gods with Olympian pow- 
ers, who can establish earthquakes; who can 
wipe away entire communities ; gods and god- 
desses whose heads are in the clouds, whose 
movements are terrific, who shake complete 
creation when they walk, and with unthink- 
able besoms sweep with horrible sweepings, 
and periodically visit the world with awful 
scourges and hellish visitations of order and 
cleanliness. 

I would not pretend to be acquainted with 
mouse literature, but I would venture a wager 
that their "Arabian Nights" outdoes ours 
as cheese, chalk. Djinns, genii, and affrites 
— can it be thought that they lack them? If 
the unaccountability of the world be, as it 
would seem to me, the basis of all literature 
and the origin of all fable, philosophy, enter- 
tainment, and speculation, can it be denied 
that they have extraordinary inducement? 
If our own world seems full of chance, and 
forever breaking away from bonds and prob- 
abilities, I only ask you to compare it with 
theirs ! — in which the unaccountable is the 
sole certainty they possess. 
206 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

I awoke one morning in the late fall, and be- 
gan to dress, giving no thought whatever to 
them and their problems. When I came to 
put on my shoe, however, I could no longer 
ignore them. In the toe of it, stowed away 
safely, were three hickory-nuts! 

Some sleek-coated citizen, with a winter 
house in mind, had wandered in those pur- 
lieus, thinking to begin the arduous labor 
requisite to the building of a home suitable 
to the long, dark season nearly at hand, when 
lo, this prudent necessity was suddenly, by a 
miraculous bounty, waived! Mark you and 
observe! Here was provided for him a home 
such as his best skill could never have con- 
trived. A place how warm, how neat, how 
conformable ! That his acceptance was im- 
mediate, was testified by his already accumu- 
lated stores. 

I paused and took them in my hand: one, 
two, three. There was a saint, I am told, who 
allowed the birds to build in his two palms, 
and did not rise from his knees until the 
fledglings were ready to fly from the nest. 
Neither was I a saint, nor could I afford such 
beneficence. I was pressed for time, as God's 
207 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

saints, I believe, never are, and I needed my 
shoe. I slipped it on as I had slipped on its 
mate; I tied its lace neatly, gave the bow an 
efficient pat, and walked away in it. It is true, 
I did put the three hickory-nuts on the bu- 
reau. I am not sure what I meant to do with 
them, but I never saw them again. Miss 
Layng, the terrible goddess of order, probably 
flung them out of the window with mutter- 
ings. 

But I ask you only to picture the romance, 
and it may be the terror, of the thing to 
the one who had laid such delightful plans, 
who had enjoyed such anticipations! House, 
stores, hopes, social aggrandizement, every- 
thing — gone ! carried off entire, by God knows 
what spirit ! and not so much as a vestige left 
to tell the tale! 

I do not forget that it is the custom to speak 
of mice as destructive; yet may not that word 
be used, after all, with something of a bias? 
I picture one of them on his way to seek a few 
bits of newspaper for the lining of a nest, and I 
imagine him suddenly endowed with the abil- 
ity to read the inky characters. He pauses in 
amaze. His eyes bulge and devour the news 
208 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

beadily. And what news it is! Statistics! 
Staggering statistics of the men and officers 
killed since our great war's beginning; and of 
aged and innocent citizens shot, women vio- 
lated, little children sacrificed, noble cities 
destroyed ! 

His hand goes over his heart to quiet its 
violent beating. Ah, what a race of gods they 
are ! Or, he reads this from a recent account of 
the bayonet practice at Plattsburg — what- 
ever "bayonet" may mean, and whatever 
"Plattsburg"; for these accessories of civili- 
zation lie ahead of him some eons. 

"Aim for the vitals," he reads. "Do not 
fire until you feel your bayonet stick. Thus 
you will shatter the bone, and you can then 
withdraw the blade. At the same time, try to 
trip your enemy with your left foot, so that he 
will fall forward." 

None of this is clear to him. This is the 
deportment, without doubt, of the immortal 
gods! Fancy the consequences of his at- 
tempting to trip his enemy, the mouse- trap, 
or the cat, or the terrier, with his left foot! 

No ; these are powers and potencies to which 
he can only look forward in dim futures, when 
15 209 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

the mouse tribe shall have attained, eons hence, 
perhaps, to a higher order of being, and to 
these godlike practices. But that, howeverglo- 
rious, is but a far dream! Meek and gentle 
and forgiving, in his inferiority, he lends him- 
self devotedly once more to his labors, and 
nibbles the newspaper, carrying off small 
pieces of it, very destructively, to build that 
near-by nest in which soon are to be born 
tiny creatures as gentle and inferior and de- 
structive as himself. 

To one who has studied mythology with a 
reverence for its revelations, it must often 
have seemed that man is kinder than his con- 
ception of the mighty powers that try him. 
Job would seem to be, rather than the Deity, 
the hero of Job's tragical story; and how much 
nobler, to cite a most obvious instance, is the 
ancient Greek than his deities ! 

However impious this may appear to the 
pious, yet to me the thing looks hopeful. 
Dread and powerful as are our own gods, — 
Authority, Mammon, Sentiment, Public Opin- 
ion, Superstition, Fear, — and many as have 
been our sacrifices offered up to them, yet may 
it not be that humanity, frail, and so largely 

2IO 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

at their mercy, retains some sovereign no- 
bilities still unvanquished by them? 

Have we not had our own disappointments 
and vicissitudes? Have not our conceptions of 
our duties and privileges and rights and gay- 
eties been but poorly adjusted to those powers 
whose awful retributions we have tempted? 
Yet I am inclined to hope that, notwith- 
standing all this, we shall still preserve some 
gentleness that cannot be conquered; shall 
still retain some virtues which, let these ter- 
rible powers descend upon us as they will, can- 
not be obliterated, that we shall be, till the 
end, something better than our fate, something 
more kind than our destiny. 

I have but speculated widely concerning 
mouse mythology. Truth compels me to 
state that it is to me, after all, but dim and 
debatable territory. I can give you nothing 
authoritative as to their philosophy. But this 
I know: they have maintained their gentleness, 
and are a reproach to those whom I take to be 
their gods. 

All else is but speculation and possibility, 
but this is the evidence of their lives. They 
are a meek and a forgiving people. Think 

211 



Vii cissitudes of Mice 

only what they endure at our hands, who 
justly make so great a matter of a Belgium 
violated, and forget, in a god-like manner, 
when it so pleases us, a violated Congo, or a 
divided Persia, or a Poland outraged and cut 
to pieces, but not defended! How gentle, 
how consistent, how without spite, ill-will, 
or grudge, they remain toward those unal- 
terably hostile to them! With what mildness 
not matched among us do they conduct them- 
selves ! How they preserve their cheerfulness, 
their good nature, their kindliness! Have you 
not heard with what gayety they roll hickory- 
nuts away? Has your ear not witnessed their 
gigglings and rejoicings? 

But their virtues go deeper than this. It 
may be told of them above all, that, however 
provident in other matters, they store up no 
malice, they preserve no hate. 

Once I lay ill in that house of which I have 
here written. I had been very wretched, but 
my physician, seated now by my bed, promised 
me I would soon be well. After that we spoke 
together, as we were wont to do, of matters of 
a philosophic kind, then paused. At the bot- 
tom of my bed, on the footboard, was a tiny 

212 



Vicissitudes of Mice 

mouse. No; it was not the same adventurous 
spirit who had visited the giant's castle and 
drunk from the plate of milk; this one was 
smaller and more slender. We did not speak. 
He came down cautiously, very gently, to the 
coverlet, then delicately up one fold, down an- 
other, pausing, listening, waiting to take note; 
pausing, waiting, foot delicately lifted, until 
he had got as far as the tray. He went very 
carefully about this, smelling and inspecting 
it ; yes, I would have sworn, inspecting. It had 
every air of his wanting to know whether they 
had brought me the right and well-cooked 
food. He tasted nothing save a tiny crumb on 
the tray itself, and then, as though satisfied, 
was gone. 

I hoped for another visit, but waited for him 
in vain. He was a little fellow, sleek of skin, 
with a black, beady eye, and very delicate 
whiskers. I never saw a daintier foot. 



213 



BIRTHDAYS AND OTHER 
EGOTISMS 

I 

Charles Lamb, in his " Grace Before Meat," 
protests — very endearingly, it seems to me — 
against the custom of particular thankfulness 
for food. He suspects that it had its origin in 
the "hunter state of man, when dinners were 
precarious things, and a full meal was some- 
thing more than a common blessing; when a 
bellyful was a windfall and looked like a spe- 
cial Providence. — " It is not otherwise easy to 
be understood," he avers, "why the blessing 
of food — the act of eating — should have 
had a particular expression of thanksgiving 
annexed to it, distinct from that implied and 
silent gratitude with which we are expected to 
enter upon the enjoyment of the many other 
various gifts and good things of existence." 

I find myself like-minded and similarly pro- 

testant as to birthdays. I cannot discover why 

the blessing of these should be hailed with any 

very particular delight, distinct from that 

215 



Birthdays 

implied joy with which we might be expected 
to welcome the many other various days of the 
year. 

It cannot be said that it was because I was 
abnormally shy throughout my childhood that 
I found birthdays embarrassing, for I had no 
more than the usual shyness of the average 
child. Moreover, my surroundings and train- 
ing gave me easy confidence in others and in 
myself. The tragedies of my little girlhood 
were not exceptional: dead cats or canaries, 
broken dolls, the inability to make myself al- 
ways understood by grown-ups, and certain 
moral and spiritual failures and cataclysms 
known only to myself and what I took to be 
my fearfully disappointed Maker. But bar- 
ring these things, incident and customary, my 
early years may be said to have been especially 
bright and reassuring. What was it, then, 
which could have caused this early distrust of 
birthdays? 

If I am to trace the growth of what perhaps 
seems so unwarranted a thing, I shall have to 
ask indulgence for what may appear to be some 
of that very egotism I decry: I shall have to 
ask to be allowed a discussion of several of 
216 



Birthdays 

my own birthdays, and their celebration when 
I was a child. 

My fifth is the earliest that I remember. I 
had been promised a cake with candles. More- 
over, I had learned, by dint of the patience 
of Mademoiselle Cinque, our queer old French 
governess, a little French song, which I was to 
sing as my own share toward the festive cele- 
bration. From the shelter of my father's arm, 
I was to sing it for the rest to hear : — 

" Frb-re Jac-guesI Frh-re Jac-gues! 
Dor-mez vous? Dor-mez vous? 
Son-nez les matines; son-nez les matines; 
Den, din, don I" 

The cake, then, and the song were, from my 
point of view, the extraordinarily important 
and sufficient events of the day — these and 
the fact that on that day I would be five years 
old. It is certain that I chattered about these 
things a great deal, and laid deep plans. But, 
as it happened, it was neither the cake nor 
yet my ripe years that were to make that 
day so memorable. I can close my eyes and 
go back to it unerring, and find myself in 
the old surroundings, familiar yet strange — 
strange that day with an unwonted, unac- 
217 



Birthdays 

countable strangeness. Where was every- 
body? The house was, indeed, still — as still 
as the February day outside, which lay quiet 
as death under a sheeted whiteness that had 
been drawn over it silently in the night. 

I can seem to feel myself actually as little 
as I was then, and with my doll under one 
arm going up the silent stairs, laboriously but 
determinedly, pulling one leg resolutely after 
the other, up the length of them, with the 
aid of one hand on the banister spindles, to 
investigate for myself the strangeness. 

An older sister of mine, whom I loved dear- 
ly, had been ill, and for several days past I 
had been cautioned to gentleness and had 
played apart, so that quietness of a certain 
kind I understood. But the quietness now was 
of a different order. In the upper hall some one 
opened a door, at the patter of my investigat- 
ing steps, I suppose; held out a hand, stopped 
me in mid-search — stopped me and kissed 
me and told me. My sister had died in the 
early hours of that day, before the dawn was 
come. 

I do not remember who it was who told 
me. I remember, however, pushing niyself 
218 



Birthdays 

away from the embrace a little, demanding 
whether I might see my mother. I was told 
with great gentleness that this was impossible. 
My father? No; him, also, I might not see — 
not yet. All this sobered and puzzled me. 
I reached for the next, and perhaps on that 
day even dearer, possibility. Might I see the 
cook? Yes. 

That, for a time at least, righted matters, 
and restored my world to me. I pattered down 
the stairs, down the lower hall, then more steps ; 
found the cook and demanded my birthday 
cake ; and in place of the cake received a most 
shocked look, delivered in the manner of un- 
thinkable rebuke. When I insisted, words came 
to her tongue, but not concerning the cake. 
They dealt wholly with myself. They conveyed 
the impression that I had done some dreadful 
and wicked thing. They did not explain. I was 
expected to understand and repent. 

I remember feeling only thoroughly out- 
raged at having my reasonable request re- 
ceived in that manner. This was my day, and, 
in honor of it, there was to have been a birth- 
day cake. As to larger matters, they were 
extraneous to the subject. Of death, it should 
219 



Birthdays 

be remembered, I had absolutely no knowledge. 
I loved my sister to the full bent of my simple 
but ardent little nature, and she had been pe- 
culiarly devoted to me ; but ask some one who 
has never seen the stars or spoken with one 
who has seen them, what he knows of the deep 
firmament : so much I knew of that night which 
had fallen upon our house — nothing ! 

What I did know presently — the informa- 
tion being conveyed to me in unmistakable 
terms by the cook — was that my birthday 
celebration was not to be ; that it was not only 
jeopardized, it was clean wiped out, by an event 
of immensely greater moment. I have little 
doubt I wept sufficiently over my personal dis- 
appointment, and it may have taken especial 
tact on the part of the gentle person upstairs to 
pacify me; but by and by, with that easy for- 
getfulness which is the better part of childhood, 
I must have relinquished all hope of appro- 
priating that day as my birthday, and ac- 
cepted, in place of it, life as it was. 

My parents, who twice before had been sum- 
moned to bear acute loss, — once when, be- 
fore I was born, a little baby brother of mine 
died, and once when the life of a little baby 

220 



Birthdays 

sister had flickered out before the flame got 
well started, — tasted now of what must have 
been a far deeper bitterness. She who had 
gone now was their "extreme hope." 

She was twenty-one when she died, and 
within a few months of her graduation at the 
University. She was brilliant above any prom- 
ise given by the rest of us. I remember her 
very clearly — her sensitive and beautiful 
face, her great delicacy of body, her ready, 
very gentle laugh, and her unfailing under- 
standing of all a little child's desires and moods. 
She was exquisite, sensitive as a mimosa in 
a garden of sturdier growth. Above us all 
she seemed to stretch delicate and flowering 
branches, in which the wind moved more mys- 
terious ; and lovely winged and songful things, 
that we could never have hoped to harbor, 
seemed to have made their home in her. There 
was in her something rare and unlooked for (I 
do not exaggerate), like the sudden call of a 
thrush in the twilight, or delicate and darkling, 
as in starlight the song of the nightingale. She 
was the one reckoned to be most like my fa- 
ther, and by the generous, and, I think, even 
proud consent of all of us, was by him the most 



Birthdays 

beloved. She was as devoted as Cordelia, and 
with lesser cause, bringing to the happiness 
and fullness of his life what Lear knew only in 
his desolation. Since I have grown into what 
is at least some slight realization of what her 
loss must have meant to my father, I cannot 
touch without a trembling of tears the mem- 
ory of his taking me in his arms as he did, to 
look upon her as she lay, white and final, 
delicate and done with life, there in the still 
and shuttered room. 

But, incredible though it seems to my pres- 
ent knowledge, I had then no feeling of sad- 
ness whatever. She might have slept. Nor did 
the days that followed lay heavy hands upon 
me. There was a quiet stir and hushed prep- 
aration toward what I did not know, and I 
was looked after by neighbors or relatives to 
the extent of believing that a certain pleasant 
distinction accrued to me. In all that followed, 
I know that I contributed no sadness, only a 
child's frank observation in the face of unusual 
behavior of its elders. 

But to return to the birthday. It was a re- 
markable one, you see, linked with all these 
things, allied to such large sorrows — a sad 

222 



Birthdays 

one and disappointing enough, you will say, 
for a little child. Yet I did not find it so. I 
was, as I have told you, indignant as to the 
cake, and disappointed, no doubt, that there 
was no happy and devoted family now gath- 
ered to hear me sing my gay little song. But 
to offset these there was a kind of reassurance 
in the day which I find it difficult to describe 
very exactly. It was as if, at one and the 
same time, this were and were not my birth- 
day. It was my day by the calendar, but in no 
other way. For a birthday is one whose dawn 
and sunset are one's very own, a day when 
one's importance is admitted very gladly by a 
certain intimate circle. But on no day of my 
life, I am sure, was I of so little importance as 
then — a very inconsiderable little person, 
playing alone in the sunshine and with my 
song unsung. Yet something in that day shines 
now across the years, as distant as a star, as 
silver, as satisfying. That something is not to 
be ascribed to any one mere incident: it was 
compounded, no doubt, of the best of every 
relationship which I felt that day for the first 
time. The extreme gentleness of the grown- 
up of whom I have told you was one element; 
223 



Birthdays 

for the rest, the companionship with my father 
in that strange still moment in the shuttered 
room; the wordless love given me by my 
mother, of a different sort from any she had 
given me before ; the quietness, giving me an 
impression as of remote spaces never dreamed 
of before; and, over all, the sense of some- 
thing strange and of a great dignity, as of pres- 
ences that moved, dread, but not unkindly. 

And the little song which I had practised 
so faithfully, and which I was to have sung! 
Little as I was, and without ever being told, 
I believe, as the day wore on, I must have had 
a dim realization of how inconsiderable it was 
in that house where Death had taken up Life's 
lute, and, brows bent above it, remembered 
the songs that Life had sung. 

II 

The birthdays that followed on this one 
were curiously unsatisfying, though they were 
celebrated appropriately enough, and with the 
fullest respect for my importance. The antic- 
ipation and approach of them, as nearly as I 
can remember, were clear joy. But the days, 
when they arrived, overwhelmed me unac- 
224 



Birthdays 

countably. There was something dispropor- 
tionate in them, so that I was glad to escape 
from their too personal glory to the more com- 
fortable commonplace of the impersonal. It 
was as if I guessed dimly, without being in 
the least aware, that this display in my honor 
had in it something almost a little cheap — 
an egotism (though I had not then so much as 
heard the word) which contrasted unfavorably 
with the large and gracious and forgetful ways 
of Life itself. 

I believe my embarrassment, my wholly 
unanalyzed sense of disappointment and dis- 
proportion, may have been, on a very diminu- 
tive scale, something akin to that which I 
am sure Joshua must have experienced, — 
not, mind you, at the moment of his extra- 
ordinary and flattering command, — no, but 
afterwards, afterwards, in the disappointed 
watches of the night, when he must have re- 
flected, with disappointed amazement, that, 
if his senses deceived him not, he, Joshua, had 
made the great luminary to stand still over 
Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon. 
Something, too, of what Joseph must have 
experienced, — not in the enjoyable dream of 
i6 225 



Birthdays 

his brothers' sheaves bowing down to his sheaf, 
and the sun and the moon and the eleven stars 
making their obeisance to him; nor in those 
long anticipatory years, when his greatness 
was approaching, and the scroll of the future 
hung loose in his hands for his remembering 
eye to read, — no, but in the actual moment 
of overwhelming fulfillment, when, from Judah 
to Benjamin, his brothers actually did bow 
down to him as ruler over all those great 
granaries of Egypt, and, as we are told, his 
mature spirit could not consent to endure so 
much, but "he sought where to weep, and 
entered into his chamber and wept there." 

These are, I believe, no mere extraneous or 
personal experiences, but are rather of the fine 
weave and fabric of humanity ; and the uneasi- 
ness I felt in my complacent little soul, I now 
believe to have been a stirring of old things, 
of ancient memories under the moon, which 
linked my little inconsiderable life, as they 
link all lives, to Egypt, Nilus, Babylon, and 
the ages that are not. 

But lest this seem but vague argument and 
debatable territory, I would like to speak of 
other childhood birthdays of my own which, 
226 



Birthdays 

it seems to me, bring to the case clear evidence 
and important testimony. 

I have said that I was one of a large family. 
Happily we could not make too important a 
matter of birthdays in our home; it would 
have kept us celebrating most of the time, and 
would have tended to make the whole year 
frivolous. For obvious reasons, then, birth- 
day parties were not many. But I remember 
one of a most lasting glory, which had as its 
excuse that one of my sisters was fifteen upon 
the fifteenth . My mother, who by mere warmth 
and gayety of sympathetic temperament was 
forever on the watch for a reason to celebrate 
something, could never have missed so valid 
an occasion. Furniture was therefore moved 
out, ferns were moved in, smilax was twined 
about the chandeliers and strung along the 
portraits, a linen dancing-cloth was stretched 
the length of the three rooms. I can still feel 
the smooth glide of my strapped slippers over 
it. Musicians were concealed in a bosky cor- 
ner. At the top of the stairs was a room known 
as the conservatory, whose plants had been all 
winter in my keeping, their condition testify- 
ing rather sadly to that fact. But now, by a 
227 



Birthdays 

lovely bounty, my sins of negligence were all 
wiped out. Florists came bearing pots of 
flowers in full blossom, and more of them and 
more of them. There were primroses such as 
my own care could never have hoped for, and 
fuchsias and candytuft and daffodils in full 
abundant bloom, even while the March winds 
outside yet blew so chill. In the day or two 
just before the fifteenth, how often I ran up 
into that little room and stood wordless and 
satisfied among them, or stooped and touched 
my cheek to them! Oh, the sweet heliotrope! 
oh, the mignonette! 

On that wonderful evening there bloomed 
among the flowers little lights with dark red 
shades, and here and there comfortable seats 
were placed, where you could hear the music 
at a muted distance. We children all wore 
new gowns, my sister — she of the birthday — 
having of course, by generous consent, the 
filmiest and the loveliest. 

That was a happy gathering if ever I saw 
one; and were I brought to believe that a 
birthday celebration is ever an affair of un- 
mixed loveliness, I should perhaps be brought 
to say it concerning one for fifteen on the fif- 
228 



Birthdays 

teenth. Fourteen on the fourteenth lacks 
flavor, is a little unripe, like fruit imported be- 
fore the real season is at hand. Sixteen on the 
sixteenth is a little over-mellow, a little late; 
already childhood is gone, and youth, however 
lovely it may be in the receiving of homage 
and favors, should already have its hands out- 
stretched rather to bestow them. But fifteen 
on the fifteenth ! There is a golden mean and a 
time for all things, as the Scriptures and the 
fairy tales tell us. This was the time to dance, 
that King Solomon talks about. Like the 
"Tuney Bear's" soup in the old tale, this 
party to celebrate fifteen on the fifteenth seems 
to me as nearly right as things can be con- 
trived in a world of chance like our own. 

Through a maze of years and smilax I am 
still aware of the delicious mystery of con- 
cealed music wailing forth the Sirens waltzes 
(no dances were given then without the Sirens 
waltzes). I can see the children moving about, 
gay and a little fluttery; and the grown-ups, 
quieter, but still gay, who came to add the dig- 
nity and charm of their greeting to the cele- 
bration ; and I can see my sister, — fifteen 
that day by a delectable distinction, — lithe 
229 



Birthdays 

and poised and gracious, and flushed and very 
pretty, standing beside my mother, her eyes 
looking out like stars under her dark hair, and 
her flying eyebrows that had just the slight 
lift of a bird's wing; and my next younger sis- 
ter and I, of a less vivid coloring, no more than 
attendant sisters, and rich enough in that, 
with our new sashes and our new delight in 
graciousness ; and my oldest sister of all, mov- 
ing about with a lovely homage to us younger 
ones, a gracious bending down of her life to ours 
for a little while. 

And every one, old and young, even some 
with gray hairs, came and bowed over the 
hand of fifteen. That impressed me most. 
And some who were a little more than guests 
— intimates — brought my sister gifts — one 
that lies here now on the table as I write: a 
beautifully bound small copy of Shakespeare's 
Sonnets, with the Dowden introduction. I did 
not know it then for what it was. I only loved 
it for its red and gold binding; but later, I 
grew up to it in my girlhood, as a young vine 
climbs at last to a trellis that is placed above 
it and awaits its growing. On its first leaf, in 
an exact hand, is written the date, my sister's 
230 



Birthdays 

name, and that of the donor. Then follows 
this wish, suitable to the day: — 

"May each succeeding birthday find you 
as light-hearted as you are to-day." 

Oh, time! time! that brings us our blunders 
and our tears! Was he so inexperienced him- 
self, he who brought her that? Or did he set 
that down in a mere spirit of carnival and 
bravado, just because she was fifteen on the 
fifteenth, and nothing else was for the moment 
to be admitted of any importance? 

I do not know how beautiful a birthday it 
was for her, but oh, for me! How I loved it! 
How good it was to bring her my homage! 
How glad and willing and eager I was that she 
should stand first ! Play, play, concealed musi- 
cians! I can still catch the plucking of the 
harp-strings, and the sweet gay wailing of the 
violins, across the years. 

HI 

One other birthday of my childhood stands 
out vividly in my memory : that one on which 
I was twelve years old. My mother had taken 
us all abroad, to widen our horizons and pro- 
mote our education. After a preliminary few 
231 



Birthdays 

months in England, we were established in 
Paris, in a comfortable apartment in a little 
hotel which they tell me is still there, and which 
went then, and still goes, by the name "Louis 
le Grand" — nothing less. 

From the moment of our arrival, in Janu- 
ary, I began to think even more of my birth- 
day than was my wont. This was, no doubt, 
largely due to the fact that, at the distance of 
a few blocks one way or another, anything 
in the world, so it seemed, could be bought. 
Shops! Shops! The rue des Petits Champs, 
the avenue de I'Opera, the boulevard des 
Italiens, were full of them. The rue des Petits 
Champs had innumerable boutiques of all kinds 
— one given over to nothing, mind you, but 
honey and gingerbread, like a shop in a fairy 
tale. If you went across the Place Vendome 
and followed the rue Castiglione, you came to 
the most romantic shops of all, there under 
the arcades of the rue de Rivoli, beginning 
with the most delectable pastry shop in the 
world on the very corner. You could walk 
there on a sunny day, disdainful of the weather, 
with the Gardens of the Tuileries opposite you, 
and feast your soul on the varied displays. 
232 



Birthdays 

But when all was said, there was nothing 
that could be compared with the shops of the 
rue de la Paix. Here you came at once into a 
richer atmosphere. Here, mainly, were jewel- 
shops, displaying tiaras and necklaces — 
"rings and things and fine array." Dolls and 
gingerbread and honey were delightful — let 
me not seem to undervalue them ; but to stand 
looking on while a master of his profession 
leaned over a velvet counter to show my 
mother brooches of jewels, and diamonds set 
in rings, was to know from the standpoint of 
childhood some of the true elevations of life. 

While my mother considered jewels set thus 
or so, my eyes roved, speculative, among the 
rich wares. I had been brought up in too old- 
fashioned a way to make any mistake as to 
my limitations. Well-bred children, it was 
understood, wore neither rings nor ornaments, 
unless one or two of a most positive simplicity. 
But watches there were, a bewildering variety 
— for we were in the shop of one Victor 
Fleury, who, among other distinctions that 
I doubt not he had, was "Horloger de la 
Marine." You can imagine whether he had 
watches! I called my mother's attention to 
233 



Birthdays 

the beauty of them, some very small ones in 
particular. She looked at them, but made no 
comment. I deduced that it was not well- 
bred for a little girl of twelve to wear a watch. 

My birthday dawned at last. I was kissed 
and wished many happy returns, and was told 
that there was to be a dinner that night es- 
pecially for me, and that I would then receive 
my gifts. The hotel was a small one. Din- 
ner would be served for the hotel guests a 
trifle earlier, so that they might the sooner 
leave the way clear for me. This had been 
proposed by Madame Blet herself, the pro- 
prietress, and was intended no doubt for a 
fine piece of hospitality. For me the strict 
hotel rules were to be slackened; the fine de- 
mocracy of hotel life, where one guest is as 
good as another, if he but pay his account, 
was to be overruled in my favor; for me the 
sun was to be advanced, and the moon set 
at a new pace in the heavens ! 

It was very grand in anticipation, I can as- 
sure you. To be twelve was of itself no incon- 
siderable glory, but to be twelve under such 
flattering conditions! I resolved to write an 
account of all this to my two chums in Amer- 
234 



Birthdays 

ica. Little girls they were, of my own age, 
but of a less colored experience. They should 
have niews of these matters. They should be 
enlightened as to the importance of her with 
whom they had commonly played visiting- 
lady and jackstones. 

Yet, as the evening drew near, old stirrings 
of uneasiness made themselves felt dimly, 
dimly — something, I cannot tell you what, 
moving on the face of undiscovered waters; 
a distrust, a shyness and embarrassment that 
had nothing to do with timidity; a dim sense 
of disproportion, I take it to have been, and of 
ancient human questionings. 

We waited a little past the usual hour, and 
then there came a knock. Joseph, our waiter, 
appeared and bowed gravely. "Mademoiselle, 
le diner est servi." 

My heart rose and fluttered. Presently we 
all went down the hall and down the red car- 
peted stairs, I with my hand in my mother's. 
I can still feel it resting there. Down the steps 
we went, my mother and I — I with a little 
delighted pause and poise at each step, the 
rest following like a court train. Twelve, and 
the youngest! Twelve, and the well-beloved 
235 



Birthdays 

and proud ! Blow, bugles, fine and high ! and 
let those who follow wear scarlet ! What more 
could a little girl ask? 

I do not know; I cannot tell you. I only 
know that, though I would not have admitted 
it for worlds at the time, when I found myself 
in the midst of the happiness it was no longer 
happiness exactly. Not, you understand, that 
I would have relinquished any of the splendor 
then. It fascinated me, of course. 

Joseph held the door open; a fine heraldic 
gesture — the flat of his palm against it, the 
fingers spread, his head flung back, his eyes 
tributary ahead of him ; his whole pose saying, 
"Stand back! She comes!" Several of the 
other servants were there, grouped to see and 
to attend. Madame Blet, in her black dress 
and perpetual shoulder-cape, — a sad-faced, 
very dignified woman, with the sadness set 
aside in my honor for that evening and posi- 
tive brightness shining from her kind eyes, — 
stood there too, with welcoming glances. She 
had decorated the table herself: there it was, a 
delight of soft lights and snowy linen, wonder- 
ful possibilities and flowers. 

The dining-room was empty yet bright, as 
236 



Birthdays 

are the heavens for the coming of the moon. 
Joseph stood, not back of my mother's chair, 
as usual, but back of mine, to see me seated. 
Those faces, very beloved in the soft light, 
were turned toward me, a little gay, and hap- 
py wholly in my happiness. It was fulfillment 
of all the dreams of importance I might ever 
have had. 

Then came the unfolding of the gifts. Any 
one who knew my mother must know that, in 
the smallest of a nest of lovely little boxes, — 
just enough of them to produce a certain curi- 
osity and delay, to enhance the final delight, 
— lay the most lovely little watch, silver- 
cased (to render it more conformable to my 
age) , and marked with the initials of my name ; 
while on its inner casing it bore proudly, as it 
still bears, while it ticks here on my table, this 
inscription: Victor Fleury, Horloger de la Ma- 
rine, 2j, Rue de la Paix, 2j, Paris. 

After the other gifts were opened dinner 
was served, Joseph bringing everything first 
to me, whose place it was usually to be served 
last of all. There were special dishes, and the 
lamb chops had on particularly fine cravats, 
and the petits pois were so very petits that it 
237 



Birthdays 

seemed nearly a shame to eat them — like 
"good little Tootle-tum Teh" in the ballad; 
and there were side dishes, very special, for 
the occasion. 

Then, as a crowning glory, a dessert not 
baked in a hotel oven at all ; no cabinet pudding 
of frequent occurrence, nothing that hinted of 
rice or raisins; no, but something fetched par- 
ticularly from the patisserie. By the look of it, 
it might have been, and probably was, con- 
cocted by a pastry cook in full regalia, in that 
superlative patisserie on the rue de Rivoli, op- 
posite the Louvre. 

It was a tower made of a hard brown candy 
flecked with chopped nuts. It had a door in 
it, and windows with embrasures at the tops 
to make you think of King Arthur and his 
knights. It was decorated on its platter by 
saccharine approaches. The tower was open 
at the top and filled with a flavored whipped 
cream. Madame Blet, who had, I doubt not, 
been directing forces from the kitchen, stood 
now in the doorway beaming like another can- 
dle. This, which had the added flavor of 
being a surprise even to my mother, was 
Madame Blet's gift to the little American 
238 



Birthdays 

mademoiselle. Once more, on a most diminu- 
tive scale, France and America were exchang- 
ing courtesies. 

But meanwhile, — oh, inevitable! — Joseph, 
that devoted ambassador, beaming unfeigned 
pride in the behavior of his country, held the 
tower at my left hand. I was to serve myself 
first. But how — I ask the heavens to answer 
me this! — how is one to serve one's self to a 
feudal tower? One desperate glance at my 
mother, — the quick dart of an alarmed swal- 
low, — then I took up the large spoon and laid 
it hesitatingly against the tower's side. But 
the tower was nearly as hard as the rock it 
represented. The approaches, also, were of 
one piece. With a mere dessert spoon, what 
can be done as to a portcullis! Shall you, do 
you think, carry off a drawbridge with a slight 
silver instrument to be held in one hand? I 
was not meeting the emergency. I was not 
equal to the occasion. This I knew, with quick 
intolerable shame. What was to be done? At 
last, after what seemed to me ages, I accepted 
the only possibility. I scooped from the top of 
the tower some of the fluffy whipped cream, put 
this on my plate and the spoon back among the 
239 



Birthdays 

approaches; and the tower, proud, unspoiled, 
unwon, was carried on to the others, who serv- 
ed themselves, as I had done; or, when the 
cream was at last too low for them to reach, 
suffered Joseph to scoop it out for them and 
put it on their plates. 

I sat tasting the whipped cream on the end 
of my spoon, and oh, it was insipid, that faint 
froth ; not of itself, but by contrast with what 
I would have wished — a portcullis at the very 
least. When we left the dining-room, it still 
stood solid and invulnerable, that so desirable 
tower, a delusion to the palate, a snare to the 
understanding, a subtle but strong disap- 
pointment to the heart ! Now that I look back 
on it, it seems like an unintended symbol, 
an uninterpreted writing on the wall of my 
childhood. 

These things called birthdays seemed for 
me to have been weighed that night in subtle 
scales, and found wanting. Froth on the tip 
of your spoon! The real anticipated glory, a 
chimera; the dreamed-of and so-much-desired 
happiness, a thing which could not be won, a 
thing left untouched while one slipped away 
unsatisfied, disappointed, into the later years. 
240 



Birthdays 

No doubt I passed on to later years that 
very evening as I went out of the lighted din- 
ing-room ; for more and more this centralizing 
of power and importance, even though it were 
for one day of the year only, became to me in- 
congruous and out of the real order of life. As 
I began to gauge values and proportions bet- 
ter, it came to seem almost a gentle buffoon- 
ery. The mild distrust I had felt for birthdays 
in my little girlhood was beginning to take on 
the form of positive distaste. 

Doubtless I was beginning to have a larger 
vision of life. For one thing, I had meanwhile 
seen dawns rise over the Alps, and day depart 
from the fruitful purple valleys to ascend 
the heights, beautiful, like the feet of those 
upon the mountains, who bring tidings of 
peace; and had watched them pause in their 
glory for a last look upon the work of their 
hands before going forth forever beyond the 
world's edge. And I had stood since then by 
the incredible sounding sea ; I had known that 
sense of the waters in the hollow of His hand, 
and watched the night bend like the face of 
infinity over it. 

17 241 



Birthdays 

IV 

Out of the birthdays I have known, I have 
recorded but three — the three made mem- 
orable, not so much by material as by spiritual 
gifts, and by some vision of life itself vouch- 
safed me. It was as if, with a touch upon my 
hand. Life summoned me to note, even though 
in some unrealized way, when I was but a child 
of five, how inconsiderable may be these our 
little personal joys and expectations and 
vanities of song, even as were mine, in the 
face of the large solemnities and griefs and re- 
membered joys with which, that day, our 
home was visited. And on that second birth- 
day, it was as if Life bade me note how satisfy- 
ing to the heart is the gift of lovely and willing 
service. Not mine the day at all; but I can re- 
member, all woven in with the ravishing music 
of harps and violins, a sense of my almost 
thrilled delight in the service that others 
brought my sister, in whose honor we were 
glad, and a high joy in my own eager and de- 
voted homage. Dimly seen in all this, though 
I could not have named it to you then, was a 
larger vision, no doubt, of this same truth 
242 



Birthdays 

translated into lovelier and more solemn mean- 
ing; as if in those lighted rooms, gay with their 
smilax and their laughter, Life had suddenly- 
laid a touch on my shoulder, and with her fin- 
ger on her lips had bade me note how sweet 
is the odor of spikenard, and how thrillingly 
beautiful are the broken pieces of alabaster. 

And the third birthday? Perhaps it was 
then that Life put into my hand a better gift 
than any — that larger knowledge, which all 
the coming years were to corroborate, that to 
have special gifts and benefits for one's self 
which are not for others, let the glamour be 
what it may, is after all but froth and disap- 
pointment; and that only the blending of one's 
life with other lives can ever really satisfy the 
heart. 

Since then I have seen birthdays of my own 
and others not a few, and have looked on at 
those of many a child. Witnessing these, I 
have sometimes been troubled to note how — 
materialists ourselves — we insist upon mak- 
ing materialists of our children also. For who 
has not beheld a little lad, triumphant as Jack 
Horner, in the midst of his birthday packages, 
or a little Midas, among his heaped-up Christ- 
243 



Birthdays 

mas toys, appropriating to himself, with our 
delighted consent, the Other Child's birthday 
also. With what shameful abundance of ma- 
terial gifts do we heap the little eager hands; 
but how few, how few, for the young and grow- 
ing spirit! 

Yet it is to be noted hopefully that our too 
personal celebrations are apt to fall away, as 
it were of themselves, in our later years; and 
doubtless with them many of our central ego- 
tisms, life correcting with a patient hand our 
dull and ofttimes willful behavior. I can- 
not be persuaded that it is solely a sensitive- 
ness to the loss of youth that prompts us to 
waive or disregard those birthdays which fall 
upon the nether side of twenty. Our neglect 
of them is more often, I like to believe, in the 
order of a gentle disavowal of old egotisms, as 
life ripens and takes on in our regard an as- 
pect larger and less personal ; even as to a na- 
tion or a religion which progresses, egotism 
and special privilege become increasingly dis- 
tasteful, and the idea of a chosen people more 
and more intolerable to the pure in heart, as 
the world matures. 

Mature life, like the mature heart, cannot 
244 



Birthdays 

endure a sovereignty over its brethren, but 
longs for the old original levels ; sheds its single- 
ness and its superiorities. We become, God 
be thanked, less considerable under the moon 
as time advances; more of a piece with life; 
better blended with the days; a part of all 
dawns and sunsets — we who before had but 
one of each to our credit. 

"I own that I am disposed to say grace up- 
on twenty other occasions in the course of a 
day besides my dinner," says Lamb. "I want 
a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, 
for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, 
or a solved problem. Why have we none for 
books, those spiritual repasts — a grace be- 
fore Milton — a grace before Shakespeare — 
a devotional exercise proper to be said before 
reading the 'Fairy Queen ' ? " 

I own also to a disposition to celebrate many 
birthdays rather than one, and am inclined to 
be thankful on twenty other occasions in the 
course of the year besides that one which falls 
so personally for me — even if so negligible — 
on a certain February morning. I confess to a 
love of calendars that sometimes give me two 
or three great names to celebrate in a single 
245 



Birthdays 

day; nor am I ashamed to admit that the 
sun rises for me the stateHer if it be upon an 
anniversary which commemorates Camoens or 
Michael Angelo. It has long been my habit, 
to celebrate quietly in my heart, when all the 
birds are singing, that day in April when, it 
is said, — uncertainly enough, — Shakespeare 
came to the earth; nor have I failed often 
to note that other day also, when, impar- 
tially in the same April weather, it is said, 
he — and Cervantes on the same day with him 
— departed from it. 

And if such remembrances as these may 
seem still to tend toward egotism, yet I think 
that claim can hardly be proved valid. For 
these, — celebrate them as personally as we 
may, — these are not men of one season but 
of all time, blended with all days, impartially 
a part of all weathers, and of the very fibre and 
lives of most of us ; and, even though we should 
forget them, yet memorably forgotten in those 
unforgettable companionships that they have 
bestowed upon us. These are our stars and 
moons, differing in glory one from another, 
with which, in the midst of our mortality, we 
answer, not ignobly, the shining challenge of 
246 



Birthdays 

the stars; these are they innumerable whose 
beauties and nobilities, coupled with our own 
inconsiderable lives, lend at last some glory 
to our days so frail, so ephemeral. 

As a child, I used to love to count the stars, 
beginning with the very first one that pricked 
its way through the twilit blue, and by a pretty 
conceit always called that first one my own, 
and put a most personal wish upon it. For a 
long time it always stood single in the heavens, 
and then another here or there, and there, and 
there, appeared, which I counted with delight. 
But always the moment came when the count 
was irretrievably lost; when stars bloomed, 
not by ones and twos, but by myriads, no 
more to be counted than the unnumbered 
sands of the sea; and over me was stretched 
the jeweled beauty of the infinite heavens, 
just breathing with the breathing of the night; 
and I, looking up glorified into that beauty, a 
little inconsiderable child, standing beside the 
soft dark shadow of the cypresses. 

THE END 



